Smart switches are a category sitting between low-end unmanaged switches that do little more than provide connectivity, and high-end fully managed boxes that offer the full functionality required in more complex network topologies to enable things like path redundancy and route table updates.

The switches offer a basic subset of the features available on fully managed ones, including only the most widely required such as trunking, VLANs, and QoS. They are managed exclusively via the web, with the switch carrying all the necessary management software and a basic web server, whereas in higher-end boxes it would be through commands in the vendor’s own operating system or via standards-based SNMP MIBs.

Santa Clara, California-based Netgear claims to have invented the category earlier this decade when it launched its first such device, the FS526T. Peter Airs, Netgear’s VAR channel manager for the UK and Ireland, said the company identified a gap in the market between unmanaged devices, which he said were priced as commodities but could offer no management functionality, and fully managed devices, which he said often cost five times as much and delivered management features that were overkill for a lot of network requirements.

We launched a Layer-2 smart switch with support for VLANs, port trunking, and security, without the need for customers to buy a full-blown L2 managed switch, he said. The box was priced to be closer to the unmanaged devices, making it an easy choice for users of the latter. Our channel often sells them as a just-in-case option, he said. The customer can deploy them as a regular unmanaged switch and then, in six months’ time, start using the management features at no additional cost, because all our smart switches ship preconfigured with them.

Last December Netgear added stackables to its smart range, launching what Airs said were the first and remain the only smart stackables in the market. The range offers three stackable models: a 24-port, 10/100 device with four GbE uplink ports, two of which for stacking (the FS728TS); a 48-port, 10/100 device with four GbE uplinks (the FS752TS), and a version of the 48-port device with 24 of its ports PoE-enabled (the FS752TPS).

At the end of April Netgear unveiled two L3 GbE stackables, the GSM7328S with 24 GbE ports and four 10Gb module bays, and the GSM7352S with 48 GbE plus four 10Gb bays. Operating at Layer 3, these devices are fully managed, competing with devices such as HP ProCurve’s 3400 series, 3Com’s 3870, and D-Link’s DXS-3350 SR.

Airs said the advantage of the Netgear GbE stackables compared to the HP ProCurve offering is that they use a resilient ring topology whereby each switch communicates over a redundant path with the next. The end one is then linked back to the first so that in the event of a link or switch failure, stack members automatically use the redundant link to communicate with the master. He said the HP switches, by contrast, use clustering with links all splaying out from the master. He said that makes the master a potential single point of failure, and while a backup master can be deployed too, it means a lot of complex wiring. He said the Netgear stackables also have a master in the stack, but it’s more like a spokesperson, and the switches themselves elect a master and backup with no specific wiring required.

He said the 3Com and D-Link switches also use stacking with resilience, but the 3Com switches have a single 10Gb module bay whereas we have four, while the D-Link boxes have a single slot into which you can only insert a dual-port module, so neither have our granularity or scalability on the uplinks.

On Netgear’s roadmap for the remainder of this year is the expansion of its smart switch portfolio. At the moment it has Fast Ethernet smart stackackles (10/100) and GbE managed stackables, so Airs said a logical next step would be to offer GbE smart stackables. We’ll also be adding more PoE boxes and, quite possibly, an 8-port GbE smart switch because our customers have been saying they want the features of a smart switch with a smaller port count, for scenarios such as four guys in a design studio who want to do things like putting a printer on a separate VLAN for segmentation purposes, he said.