RAM | Reseller Advocate Magazine: Issue 52

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by William Van Winkle

Power over Ethernet (PoE)

Properly known as the IEEE 802.3af standard, Power over Ethernet has been with us since 2003 but only now is starting to gain real market traction. The technology supplies up to 16.8W of power (48 VDC max) over two pairs of four-pair LAN cabling, such as CAT5, CAT5e, and CAT6, over distances of up to 100 meters. Some vendors tweak the IEEE spec to supply more power per port. A PoE-compatible device can draw all necessary power from the Ethernet line, alleviating the need for an AC line and transformer. The two most common devices today are VoIP phones and security cameras, although a wider variety of peripherals (and possibly PoE-powered computers) is expected in the future.

PoE requires a DC injector at some point to apply voltage to the LAN cabling. This can be done with a single-line device, such as D-Link's single-port DWL-50 injector, which uses an AC adapter and sits anywhere between the network hub/switch and the target PoE-compatible device. (If the device doesn't natively support PoE, the DWL-200 comes with the DWL-50 plus a suitable adapter.) Alternatively, there are multi-port injectors, which you might install near a structured wiring can. A more evolved form of the multi-port injector is a SKU such as D-Link's DWL-P1012 12-Port PoE Midspan. This 1U, 19" rackable box adds a management port for GUI-based control over individual port configurations and is a simple way to add PoE into a rack system without replacing any existing infrastructure.

Most commonly, high-end and mid-range switches are now coming with integrated injectors, meaning each switch port is powered out of the box. Cisco, HP, and others have been offering PoE switch lines since 2004, and the technology continues to trickle down toward the SMB and mainstream spaces. It seems likely that soon enough all but the lowest-end routers will offer PoE. This is a good opportunity to get ahead of the curve and equip clients with PoE now so they're ready for the inevitable tide of PoE peripherals to come.

One example might be Linksys' WAP54GPE Wireless-G Exterior Access Point ($400 street). This sleek, weather-proof unit with internal 18dBm antenna and WPA-TKIP/AES security can sit comfortably on a building's outer wall, plugging straight into an externally mounted LAN jack, with no need for additional electrical wiring or unsightly cabling. End-users might employ this for anything from Internet access around the pool to VPN access for a company parking lot.

Switches

At long last, 2006 appears to be the year that manufacturers will discover en masse that Gigabit Ethernet really does exist in the home and small business markets. Manufacturers across the board are finally deploying Gigabit switches for all market segments, but kudos go to D-Link for having pushed the impending need for Gigabit in this consumer and small biz space years before its now-backtracking rivals conceded that a market existed—or soon would.

Gigabit-enabled PC motherboards have been selling in the enthusiast sector for quite some time, and with falling port prices and rising PCI Express deployment, Gigabit is now on the fast track to replacing Fast Ethernet. D-Link's five-port 10/100 DES-105 retails for $45 while the five-port Gigabit DGS-1005D lists at $50. Now, for $1 more per port, what customer in his right mind wouldn't pay for the future-proofing and full backward compatibility of Gigabit? Retail outlets still have yet to catch on to this fact as they continue to move through dead-but-still-walking 10/100 stock. You can easily swipe this business by quickly educating customers on the advantages of a larger pipeline for future concurrent applications, including voice, music subscriptions, and HD content streaming. Additionally, NAS backup over Fast Ethernet is maddeningly slow. A showroom demonstration of a 5GB dataset backup over 100 Mbps versus 1,000 Mbps should convince nearly anyone.

Another feature now migrating from the enterprise and high-end enthusiast markets into the mainstream is quality of service, or QoS. As QoS gains in popularity, its meaning often becomes more ambiguous, but in networking, QoS denotes the probability of IP packets flowing successfully between LAN points. Dependable packet flow is essential for traffic where continuous service at an application's peak bandwidth is needed. Popular examples include VoIP, video streaming, and gaming. In each case, traffic hiccups can prove anywhere from annoying to disasterous.

Ambiguity starts creeping in when vendors note QoS solely on the basis of available bandwidth. When VoIP apps max out at 200 Kbps, a Gigabit switch almost certainly guarantees quality of service because even a dozen voice streams running alongside a 500 KBps FTP download barely make a dent in the WAN link capacity. You could run continuously until the cows come home and never face a LAN congestion issue. Congestion at the router can cause dropped packets, one of the chief sources of loss in QoS, owing to full buffers. However, ample bandwidth greatly mitigates this risk.

What switch bandwidth won't guard against is factors existing beyond the LAN gateway, meaning out on the Internet. Packets can get detained at remote servers. A packet stream can see its pieces routed to different servers and thus arrive at the LAN at different times, a phenomenon known as jitter. Moreover, these pieces can arrive out of order and require additional processing time at the destination. Still, the major QoS play is at the switch's uplink, and QoS-centric switches can be customized to give priority to packets originating from designated applications or ports. Cisco and others have been delivering QoS in enterprise products for years, but D-Link, having worked extensively with AT&T engineers, was the first to introduce the functionality into the home market.

"You have QoS settings at the switch and at the client side," says Allen Powell of Cisco-Linksys, "and this upgrades prioritization across the network. The majority of your network traffic runs through that switch or router, so you definitely want to have your QoS settings properly configured, as well as any VLANs or network configuration at the switch and router level, to ensure that those calls are getting out to the Internet without significant noise or static, etc."

Linksys in particular has been aggressive on educating small business resellers about QoS—what QoS means, guidelines on setting up networks for VoIP, and so forth—through webinars, downloadable presentations, and other means. Lest anyone think that Linksys leaves all of the corporate business for its Cisco side, check out the SRW224P, a 24-port Fast Ethernet plus 2-port Gigabit switch with managed PoE, four priority queues and other advanced QoS techniques, traffic policing, bandwidth aggregation between switch trunks, and secure remote configuration via Linksys' WebView software. Port and user management features help to make this an extremely robust option for small businesses and sizable workgroups looking to adopt high-bandwidth and continuous network applications now and in the future.

The idea of a "smart swtich" like the SRW224P is another enterprise fixture now gaining increasing popularity in the SMB world, and NETGEAR has been an avid promoter of smart switches for SMBs by way of its ProSafe line.

"The smart switch is a cost-effective robust solution for a reseller who wants to add scalability and management capability for his customers," says NETGEAR's Mike Stetter, director of VAR/distribution sales. "If a customer wants some basic management features—QoS, SNMP, port trunking, or VLANs—it's a very cost-effective way to add management to a network. For some of these smaller companies who just can't afford to spend the money on fully managed switches from 3Com, HP, Cisco, and if they don't want to spent the money to go to a NETGEAR fully managed switch, a Smart Switch is a great solution for the small end-user with 100 seats or less."

As an example, Stetter paints the picture of a small company with 30 or 40 employees. Accounting folks sit in one area, marketing in another area, and salespeople in yet another. Different people get different rights on the network according to their needs, and the admin wants to be able to provide certain bandwidth to certain users. Maybe the marketing staff needs bandwidth priority because of the massive files they pass back and forth all day. The admin (hopefully the reseller) could take half of the bandwidth of the switch, for example, and move it to just two or three ports. Managing traffic is a snap because all configuration is Web-based.

"An administrator would want to migrate from an unmanaged switch environment over to a managed switch environment for many reasons," says ZyXEL product manager Phil Thompson. "First and foremost would probably be security. In some networks, it is important to segregate some departments from others. For instance, you may not want your accounting department accessible from your operations department. Also, if you have a guest network, you may want them to be able to access the Internet, but not the intranet.

"Another reason to migrate over to a managed switch environment could be simple maintenance and logging," Thompson adds. "Managed switches can tell an administrator which ports are getting the most use, which ports may be bad, which ports are causing collisions. Data like that can help keep the network running smoothly."

These sorts of higher-level feedback services are part of what set true managed switches above smart switches. Customers with greater needs for monitoring and adjusting workflow efficiency as well as keeping an eye on ROI are likely to prefer managed SKUs. Either way, smart or managed switches can help allay the common fear that adding more devices or applications to a network will negatively impact overall performance. Administrators can now keep watch over network conditions, either locally or remotely, and manage them via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Once a client realizes that switch management can be easy, or at least monitored and maintained by the reseller under a service contract, he'll be far more receptive to adding additional network devices and applications, each of which have their own ROI and revenue prospects.

While not a major force in the SMB market just yet, look for 10 Gigabit Ethernet to slowly rise in the ranks over the next couple of years. Manufacturers are just starting to roll out SMB-level 10G switches. SMC, for example, debuted its first semi-core unit, the SMC8708L2 TigerSwitch, about five months ago with 10G bandwidth on all eight ports. Throughout the market, 10G sales are still very low—as you'd expect when the price per port is still in the $2,000 to $3,000 range. Still, according to Tony Stramandinoli, vice president of marketing for SMC, volume shipments are doubling quarter over quarter.

"The applications for 10G today are primarily are in server farms," says Stramandinoli. "There are 10Gig PCI-X or PCI Express adapters you can put in your server and backbone all of your storage or Internet servers into a 10Gig switch. There are edge switches, stackable Gigabit switches, that take Gigabit to the desk, and they have 10Gig uplinks now so you can improve the performance between stacks of switches or certain workgroups in a building."

As pricing drops, expect to see more 10Gig in the storage vertical market. Storage cabinets are common in many verticals, and each cabinet tends to feed into a Gigabit switch. In larger organizations, a 10G switch can serve to tie these cabinets together into a centrally managed site without constricting overall network performance.

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