Turbo charge your local area network with Gigabit Ethernet to increase performance, maximize your network uptime and reduce expensive downtime.

WIRELESS BROADBAND SWITCHES VOIP NAS

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gigabit ethernet switch solutions

THE REBIRTH OF THE DATA CENTERMore and more companies and organizations are seeing the benefi ts of pooling and sharing storage and information servers. Business applications that rely on these servers can be designed to be more scal-able and more resilient to the ups and downs of traffi c patterns. The standardization and commoditization of server hardware means that organizations involved in graphics, multimedia, medical imaging and any other data intensive applications can implement advanced data center architectures that were once only available to publicly funded academic research and military institutions.

Ethernet is the obvious choice to provide the network infrastructure between the application servers and storage. Ethernet certainly has the scalability and performance, but can it match the reliability and predict-ability of the old mainframe backplane and channel architectures?

The answer is that advanced high performance Gigabit Ethernet switch engines can now provide not just the scalability but also the predictabil-ity, reliability and security needed to deliver the critical service levels of today’s modern distributed processing applications.

But there is a caveat: not all switches have the design and capacity to handle the traffi c generated by large server and storage farms. It is critical that the network switch selected has the capacity, port density, reliability and predictability needed for this most critical and important role.

In this SMC solutions brochure we explain the jargon and show you the key features that will help you to turbo charge your network and reduce expensive downtime. We will help you to understand the alphabet soup of different standards and protocols so that you can make the right decision for your Gigabit network. SMC combines the latest innovation with over 30 years of design experience to give you the best Gigabit Ethernet solutions on the market.

GIGABIT ETHERNET REACHES THE DESKTOPSince its development in the early 1980s by Digital Equipment Corpora-tion, Intel and Xerox, Ethernet has become the de-facto physical layer standard for local area networking. In that time it has progressed from a 10 Mbps shared broadcast system, running over thick coaxial cable, to 10 Gbps running full duplex over fi ber optic cables.

The last major Ethernet transition occurred in the late 1990s when 100Mbps Ethernet was deployed to the desktop to replace the older 10Mbps connections. In tandem, Gigabit Ethernet was deployed in network backbones to aggregate the extra 100 Mbps feeds.

Now another major transition is happening. The wide availability of auto-sensing Ethernet chipsets, supporting both 10/100 Mbps and 1 Gbps, has meant that everyone can now have high speed connections to the desktop for less than $25. Business PCs and workstations are now shipping with Gigabit Ethernet support; even high-end laptops include Gigabit as standard.

The latest 10 Gigabit standard is now starting to be deployed in data center backbones and is expected to start appearing in enterprise LANs over the next 2-3 years. As the latest IDC Ethernet port forecasts shown in Figure 1 below indicate, the time is therefore right for planning the next migration and updating switch infrastructures to handle it.

The proliferation of multimedia applications combining images, video and sound means that fi le sizes greater than 50 Mbytes are not uncommon. Users expect pictures to appear instantaneously; only Gigabit Ethernet can guarantee this level of response time. As shown in Table 2 the use of Gigabit connections can have a dramatic impact on fi le transfer times.

But the growing deployment of high speed PCs and workstations is placing an extra strain on the network infrastructure. While existing Ethernet switches with Gigabit uplinks are fine for connecting a few PCs and laptops equipped with 100Mbps Fast Ethernet, they are not appropriate for use in a company deploying Gigabit-capable PCs, workstations and servers. For these environments a high performance Gigabit Ethernet switch with a 10 Gigabit uplink capability is absolutely necessary to give the required levels of control, network performance, security and reliability.

Modern Gigabit Ethernet switches can provide all these functions using standard techniques such as VLANs, Port Trunking, secu-rity, prioritization and fi ltering backed up with comprehensive SNMP network management.

THE COST OF DOWNTIME Unscheduled downtime can be a disaster for companies whose business runs on their IT network. An article in Network World* estimated the cost of downtime for different types of businesses. As shown in Table 3, this can vary from $700 a minute for a basic infrastructure to $11,000 a minute for a large supply chain management implementation. For such a company, a broken network can mean the production lines stop and the customer deliveries cannot be made.

The Gartner Research group has also studied the typical level of planned and unplanned downtime in major companies and have found that an uptime of 99.5% is better than average. This equates to nearly 44 hours of unplanned downtime a year. For a large e-commerce company with revenues of $1B per year, this would equate to around $5M per year in lost revenues.

TypeSpeed (Mbps)

IEEE Standard

Media Types PHY Type

Ethernet 10 802.3Coaxial

Thinwire10Base-510Base-2

Fast Ethernet

100 802.3uCopper (UTP)

Fiber100Base-TX100Base-FX

Gigabit Ethernet

1000 802.3ab/zCopper (UTP)

Fiber 1000Base-CX

1000Base-SX/LX

10 Gigabit

Ethernet10000

802.3ae

802.3an

FiberSDH

Copper

10GBase-R10GBase-W10GBase-T

TABLE 1: TYPES OF ETHERNET

FIGURE 1: ETHERNET PORTS SHIPPED FORECAST 2002-2008SOURCE: WORLDWIDE LAN SWITCH FORECAST, ©IDC, 2004

Data volume

Transfer time (seconds)

10 Mbps 100 Mbps 1 Gbps 10 Gbps

1 MB 0.8 0.08 0.008 0.0008

10 MB 8 0.8 0.08 0.008

100 MB 80 8 0.8 0.08

1 GB 800 80 8 0.8

10 GB 8000 800 80 8

TABLE 2: DATA TRANSFER TIMES

Business application Estimate outage cost-per-minute

Supply chain management $11,000

E-commerce $10,000

Customer service $3,700

WAN service $3,500

Financial management $1,500

Human capital management $1,000

Messaging $1,000

Infrastructure $700

TABLE 3: DOWNTIME COSTS*SOURCE: HOW TO QUANTIFY DOWNTIME, NETWORK WORLD/ALINEAN, USA 2004

VLANsThe great thing about Ethernet is that it is plug-and-play. Just plug the devices into a switch and they will fi nd each other and start talking to each other. The downside of this is that PCs and workstations attached to Ethernet become very chatty and broadcast a lot of messages to every device connected to the switch. For a 4 port switch this is not a problem but once you connect 40, 400 or 4000 devices, the amount of broadcast traffi c can start to seriously slow down and degrade the network.

To cut down on the amount of broadcast traffi c you can create Vir-tual LANs (or VLANs for short) which operate as separate broadcast domains. This means that members of a VLAN can only talk directly to other members of the VLAN as shown in Figure 2. If members of different VLANs need to communicate, then a router is required. A router uses Layer 3 IP addresses to forward packets to the correct destination. Some modern Ethernet switches combine these two functions in the same device which is known as a layer 3 switch.

Management of VLANs can be simplifi ed by using the recent GVRP and IEEE 802.1s/v protocols which provide dynamic VLAN registration and per-VLAN spanning tree protocol support.

PORT TRUNKING When large numbers of end-users need to access shared resources such as fi le servers or database storage, the connection to the server or storage device can become a bottleneck. For instance, it only takes 10 PCs with 100Mbps connections performing transfers to and from a shared fi le server to saturate a 1 Gbps connection to the server.

The solution is to use Port Trunking or Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to bundle multiple connections and use the combined bandwidth as if it were a single fat pipe. In the example shown in Figure 3 below, up to 80 users can perform simultane-ous 100Mbps transfers or 8 power users can transfer at 1 Gbps to 2 servers which are quad linked with 4 x 1 Gbps connections.

10 GIGABIT UPLINKS

The Gigabit Ethernet switches can use 10 Gigabit uplinks to connects directly to storage devices and servers and also to build a 10Gbps net-work backbone running between the main switches in the network.

TRAFFIC PRIORITIZATION, RATE LIMITING & FILTERINGGigabit Ethernet allows you to support more end-users and more data intensive applications. But the traffi c that they each generate does not have the same characteristics. For instance, Voice over IP traffi c (VoIP) is not heavy volume but must be delivered fast and predictably to prevent break-up of the voice patterns. File transfer is the exact opposite: it generates high data volumes but the speed of delivery of the traffi c is not critical; it does not matter if packets arrive at uneven intervals as long as they all arrive eventually. Video streaming is both high volume and time sensitive so must be delivered at the right rate to prevent the pictures displayed from breaking up.

For these reasons, the switching devices must be able to recognize dif-ferent traffi c types and give each the appropriate Quality of Service required. For instance, in the example in Figure 5 below, a network has a mixture of VoIP traffi c (green), regular fi le transfer traffi c (orange), video streaming (blue) and background broadcast traffi c (red).

The Gigabit Ethernet trunk between the two switches would become a bottleneck if one type of traffi c was allowed to dominate the link. This could reduce the quality of the voice or video traffi c. By assigning priority classes for each type of traffi c, the switches are able to ensure that:

• VoIP traffi c is always given the highest priority and is transmitted before anything else

• Video traffi c is given priority but is also rate limited to ensure that the video streams do not swamp the receiver and are delivered at the rate required

• Normal fi le transfer is given a lower priority and is processed on a best effort basis

• Broadcast traffi c is given the lowest priority and may be dropped if the available bandwidth is not enough

In summary, Gigabit Ethernet switches control traffi c by:• Quality of Service: Using IEEE 802.1P to defi ne up to eight traffi c

classes. The traffi c can be labeled as urgent, business critical and best-effort and the intervening switches and routers set up to prioritize the traffi c accordingly

• Traffi c rate limiting: To control the amount of bandwidth that any port, user, or application is allowed to consume

• Network segmentation: Defi ning VLANs to keep broadcast traffi c within its own broadcast domain

• Traffi c fi ltering: Using Broadcast Storm Control and IGMP snooping to restrict multicast/ broadcast traffi c

WIRELESS BROADBAND SWITCHES VOIP NAS

FIGURE 2: ETHERNET VLAN SWITCHING

FIGURE 3: ETHERNET TRUNKING

FIGURE 4: 10 GBE TRUNKING

FIGURE 5: TRAFFIC PRIORITIZATION

10G FIBER

1G FIBER

10G COPPER

1G COPPER

10/100

PoE

WIRELESS

LEGEND

As the price of the latest 10 Gigabit compo-nents inevitably drops, most fi le servers and data storages devices will start to support 10 Gigabit trunks. This will allow even more Gigabit capable PCs and workstations to connect at full speed as shown in Figure 4 below.

SMC Gigabit Ethernet switches

The TigerStack II 10/100/1000 (SMC8824M/48M) stacks up to 8 units providing up to 384 Gigabit ports. A stack can be created with either of the 24 or 48 port switches, providing unprecedented fl exibility. It provides up to 48 built-in copper Gigabit ports, including (4) Combo SFP ports supporting either copper links or SFP adapters for easy, fl exible connection to fi ber-based Gigabit media and a switching capacity of up to 176Gbps. The 2 10G module slots on the rear of the switch provide support for XFP 10G connections. These provide high bandwidth connections to the core of a network and are in additon to the 2 stacking connectors.

SMCXFPMOD - 1 port uplink module for the SMC8824M and SMC8848M providing 10G connections for Fiber. NOTE: When using the SMCXFPMOD an XFP transciever is also required.

10GBASE-T Module coming soon.

The SMC8126L2, SMC8150L2 & SMC8124PL2 TigerSwitch 10/100/1000 provide wire speed 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet switching specifi cally designed for SMB workgroup environments. High-speed performance combined with an advanced feature set allows an increase in throughput and fl exibility for the SMB. Built around the latest in switching silicon design the SMC8126L2 & SMC8150L2 are also future proofed for growth as new software features become standardized and essential for the SMB network. The SMC8124PL2 also includes PoE support, and provides the ultimate fl exibility for the SMB by combining gigabit Ethernet and 802.3af PoE support. As part of SMC’s on-going commitment to the environment this new switch family has been designed with the latest environment standards in mind concerning manufacturing processes, packaging and recycling.

The TigerSwitch 1000 SMC8612XL3, performs Layer 2 switching and IP-based Layer 3 routing in the same box. It includes 12 Gigabit Fiber SFP 1000BASE-X ports as well as 4 associated 1000BASE-T Gigabit copper ports.

SMC Networks’ Small Form Pluggable (SFP) transceivers can be plugged into any TigerSwitch with SFP slots to allow simple Gigabit fi ber-optics network expansion. From short range SMC1GSFP-SX (MMF, up to 550m) to the long reaching SMC1GSFP-LX (SMF, 70km and more), SMC Networks has the best SFP solution for you.

SMC 10 Gig aggeration switches

For aggregating Gigabit Ethernet networks SMC provides a range of 10G Ethernet switches, SMC8708L2 provides XFP ports and the SMC8724-10BT provides 20 ports of 10GBASE-T (802.3an compliance) and 4 ports of XFP.

For more information refer to our 10G solution guide.

For more informationFor more information about SMC’s unique 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switch solutions and to fi nd out how they can help you turbo charge your data center to increase performance, maximize your network availability and reduce expen-sive downtime visit our website at www.smc.com

©2008, SMC Networks. All rights reserved.

WIRELESS BROADBAND SWITCHES VOIP NAS

SMC S GIGABIT ETHERNET SWITCH SOLUTIONSSMC Networks has over 30 years experience in designing and manufacturing network equipment. SMC’s Gigabit switches provide a complete off-the-shelf solution including chassis systems, stackable units, fi xed and modular confi gurations for 10/100/1000 Mbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet over copper or fi ber.

SMC Networks’ TigerSwitch and TigerStack range of Gigabit Ethernet switches provide full support for: • 10/100/1000 Mbps connections using copper or fi ber interfaces• 10 Gbps connections • Full VLAN support with GVRP and IEEE 802.1s/v support• Multilink trunking with LACP• Broadcast fi ltering, traffi c prioritization and rate limiting • Robust security features such as: ACLs, 802.1x for secure network access enabled by RADIUS and TACACS+

and SSH, SSL/HTTPS for secure management• Jumbo Frames to reduce overhead and maximize network throughput• Full SNMP Management using EliteView or any other SNMP-based management system

SNMP MANAGEMENTThe Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the established industry standard for managing all types of network devices. SNMP provides the management of different network devices using a comprehensive set of Management Information Bases or MIBs. Using these MIBs, SNMP management tools can be used to monitor and manage all kinds of network devices. SNMP provides support for traps and events so that thresholds and conditions can be defi ned and actions taken when they are triggered. These actions can range from generating a message on an operator screen, turning a device icon a different color on a network map or sending a text message or phone call to the person responsible for managing the network.

ELITEVIEW MANAGEMENT SOFTWAREFurthermore, SMC makes available its advanced EliteView as a complimentary download EliteView is a Windows-based workgroup network management software solution with a streamlined, event-driven, modular architecture that makes managing hundreds of network nodes simple. It provides state-of-the-art utilities which allow you to perform the following network management tasks:

• Generate a detailed hierarchical map of your entire network confi guration

• Maintain centralized boot services that provide network addresses and information on system fi les to download

• Monitor and log signifi cant events and statistics

• Automatically respond to network problems with a variety of actions

• Quickly obtain or set MIB variables for network devices

• Remotely manage or reconfi gure both SMC and third-party network devices

• Full MIB Compiler for including other network devices

FIGURE 6: ELITEVIEW SNMP MANAGEMENT TOOL