D-Link Switches

We received two network switches from D-Link, a managed and an unmanaged one. Let's dwell on their features and analyze their performance based on the benchmark results.

DES-3026

This is a 24 port 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet Managed Layer 2 Switch. As you would expect from a managed network device, the switch is easy to configure through a Web based interface. It supports all Standard L2 features such as VLANs, Link Aggregation, IGMP Snooping, Spanning Tree, etc.

In its security features, the switch provides traffic control and segmentation, port security, trusted hosts, etc. It also comes with some QoS features such as IEEE 802.1P port default priority, IEEE 802.1P user priority, etc. Port Bandwidth is another useful feature in QoS, which provides control on transmitting and receiving data rates for any selected port.

The product also ships with D-View SNMP network management software. This software has useful tools that allow you to effectively manage device configurations, fault tolerance, and security. For non-D-Link switches, it has an MIB compiler to compile MIB files of the third party device into a system-recognized format.

We stressed the switch with NetIQ Qcheck. It gave an average throughput of 94 Mbps and a maximum throughput of '96 Mbps' in an isolated network while transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to another and in a response time of 1ms. Overall, the switch is very easy to use and configure.

DGS-1024D

This one is a plug n play 24-port unmanaged Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet Switch. It supports IEEE 802.3 Ethernet, 802.3u Fast Ethernet, 802.3x Flow Control and 802.3ab Gigabit Ethernet standards. According to D-Link, it has a MAC Address table size of 8K to facilitate scalability. The larger the MAC address table size the larger the number of networks that the switch can support.

According to D-Link, this switch provides flow control for full-duplex mode, and back pressure flow control for half-duplex mode which eases traffic congestion and ensures reliable data transmission. The back-pressure flow control allows loss-free transmission by having gateways verify that the next gateway has sufficient buffer space available before sending data.

It also has Auto-Negotiation on its each port, which senses the link speed of a network device connected (either 10, 100 or 1000 Mbps) and ensures compatibility of the port's speed with that of the network device.

Its each port supports a cable diagnostic feature which informs the user about cable related problems through LED's. However, this feature is only available at Switch Bootup.

This switch was again tested using NetIQ's Qcheck. It gave an average throughput of 728 Mbps on transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to another, which is pretty much similar to the other Gigabit switches we have tested in the past.

Bottom Line: Considering its performance and features, DGS-1024D switch is ideal for briskly adding Gigabit Ethernet LAN functionality to your servers, network backbone connections, etc, even though the price is a little high. The managed DES-3026 switch has customizable features and its performance and price make it worth a buy.

Swapnil Arora

Source: PCQuest