Meeting today's business needs, challenges

IT continues to become more tightly integrated with business across all industries. Technology is the means by which business can provide better access to information in near or real-time to satisfy customer needs, while simultaneously driving new efficiencies, said Wynand Moller, D-Link Country Manager.

However, today's business network infrastructures face growing scalability, agility, and security challenges.

Today, network is intensely crowded with security demand, user access control, and bandwidth-intensive applications. Network needs to target not only availability and reliability, but services too, as business-critical applications become increasingly interactive and traffic patterns become less predictable.

IP video (eg, surveillance, teleconferencing, and streamed programming), voice over IP (VOIP), and sophisticated Web-based applications now require switches that not only provide high quality performance, but also manageability. In adapting to these new demands and aligning the network with business application priorities, IT managers must make sure the network delivers business value on two fronts: user experience and operational excellence.

Unmanaged switches without the basic features and functionality for managing data, video and voice applications traffic are history.

The challenge of boosting bandwidth, maintaining network security and its uptime, while keeping it within tight budget constraints, is no easy feat. Cost and downtime considerations are often factors that discourage businesses from upgrading to network infrastructure, but problems may arise if actions are not taken. Failure to meet business application priorities can result in poor productivity, revenue loss, downtime and frustration among users and IT staffs.

IT managers have several important tasks, such as:

* Managing users' access network resources and across departments.
* Controlling network bandwidth and network traffic priorities.
* Easy detection, central management and firmware upgrade for network devices.

D-Link Web-Smart Switches offer a solution that comes with key “managed switch” features without the hefty price tag of managed switches, and this provides a perfect solution for budget-minded businesses looking for advanced features, such as:

* Virtual local area networks (VLANs)
* Access control list (ACL)
* User authentication
* Quality of service (QOS)
* Easy detection and management of network devices

D-Link Web-Smart Switch offers more features, easy configuration - all at an affordable price, business resources availability - reliability and security are no longer an issue.

User access control management:

Unmanaged Switch is good for ease of communicating freely with one another within the LAN. It is also common knowledge that unauthorised access of critical data across departments is possible. One of the ways to work around unauthorised and cross-department access of data is to group users into different virtual local area networks (VLANs), enforce user access control list (ACL) and user authentication. With unmanaged switch, however, this cannot be done.

D-Link Smart Switch offers virtual local area networks (VLANs) to segment the network, access control list (ACL) to enforcing user access control and 802.1x user authentication to allow only legitimate users to access the network.

Controlling network bandwidth:

One common problem that IT managers face is the control of network bandwidth. Regardless of whether we are in an unmanaged network or a managed network that is not configured properly, we face bottlenecks of bandwidth misuse. Today, with so many users using peer-to-peer applications, large amounts of network resources and bandwidth are being consumed, leaving critical applications often with insufficient bandwidth.

D-Link Web-Smart switches feature 802.1p and DSCP-based QOS that enables administrators to set different priority for different applications, users, or data flows to guarantee a level of performance for a particular data stream. Without QOS in place, real-time applications such as VOIP and video streaming will fight over available bandwidth and result in slow network traffic, bringing it to a crawl.

A common task frequently performed by administrators is to locate network devices and firmware upgrades. Not all switches offer easy discovery and upgrade of firmware. In fact, some are quite cumbersome, especially those that only allow a single firmware upgrade at a time, and only one method of upgrading through a Web interface or command line.

Ease of discovery and firmware upgrade of network devices are also an important area we should look at to minimise bottlenecks coming from unnecessary tasks managing the network. D-Link Web-Smart Switch comes with SmartConsole Utility, which helps users easily discover D-Link Web Smart switches, enable easy installation and configuration.

Administrators can automatically discover up to 254 Web-Smart Switches within a network for configuration. Users can also perform multiple devices' firmware upgrade with this utility.