Our assessments discovered 7 following-era changes bristle with functions that don't appear in numerous earlier designs - not only actual physical functions like 10-gigabit Ethernet uplinks but additionally 802.1X-dependent system accessibility manage authorization, improved multicast assistance,SMB Switches thunderstorm manage, DoS safety and IPv6 assistance.Pity the modest accessibility change. These package pushers generally function very well they're packed into wires cabinets and quickly overlooked. Package in, package out. Finish of tale.
Or perhaps is it? Network managers may need a whole new lexicon just to make buying decisions if the results of Network World's latest switch tests are any guide. Our assessments discovered 7 following-era changes bristle with functions that don't appear in numerous earlier designs not only actual physical functions like 10Gigabit Ethernet uplinks but additionally 802.1X-dependent system accessibility manage authorization, improved multicast assistance, thunderstorm manage, denial-of-services safety and IPv6 assistance.
We evaluated changes which sported 48 10/100/1000Mbps plug-ins and 2 10G plug-ins -- in 10 locations, encompassing L2 and L3 IPv4 multicast and unicast overall performance, L2 multicast team capability, 802.1X/NAC assistance, thunderstorm manage, usability and management, energy usage, featuring. General, we discovered large variations in assistance and balance in items analyzed from Alcatel-Lucent. For instance: More basic issues like group capacity and even system stability were bigger differentiators in our tests, although multicast throughput and latency varied widely.
It had taken several software program creates from some suppliers simply to make it through business-regular multicast assessments, and after that only utilizing completely different team matters.Whilst all changes backed 802.1X authorization, there have been significant variants in the degree of granularity of accessibility manage. Not every switch supported some common use cases, and two switches forwarded unauthenticated traffic when operating in so-called multi-auth mode, posing security issues.All devices had "storm control" features to help mitigate DoS attacks, but these varied widely in terms of rate control and signature detection.