Extreme Networks Summit X450-24t

This is a managed switch with 24 10/100/1000 ports, 4 mini-GIBC ports and a managed port at the back, largely meant for telecom service providers and data centers. This switch has quite a few features to ensure high availability such as redundant power supply, modular operating system, Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol also known as virtual router.

The Extreme Switch OS i.e ExtemeWare XOS monitors independent OS processes and in case any of them halts it automatically restarts them. It also has support for Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS) which allows network to recover from a link fail-over within a second. The switch supports all standard layer 2 and layer 3 features such Spanning Tree Protocol with multiple STP domains, IP Multinetting, DHCP and BOOTP relay and policy based QoS.

With its latest firmware the switch can be easily configured through its web interface. The web interface also provides various monitoring statistics, such as Event logs, Utilization Chart, Statistics Table and Bandwidth Chart. The switch also supports Parallel ID and Serial ID GBICs.

 We tested the switch using NetIQ Qcheck over an isolated Gigabit Ethernet network. The maximum throughput it gave was 615Mbps when transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to another. Next we flooded the switch with large amounts of traffic and checked for throughput, again. This time, the lowest throughput it gave was 500 Mbps, which is pretty good.

Bottom Line: Considering its huge variety of features and performance switch is a good buy.