Extreme Switch Packs 48 Ports

The Summit48si packs 48 auto-negotiating 10/100 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and dual hot-swappable power supplies into one rack unit, said John Erlandson, director of product marketing for Extreme.

The Summit48si's Layer 3 routing platform supports IP multicast, RIP (Routing Information Protocol) and OSPF (Open Shortest Path First), as well as 802.1x authentication, Erlandson said.

Layer 3 at the edge is critical for routing, quality of service, security and traffic redirection, he said. "People used Layer 2 at the edge because Layer 3 was more expensive and slower," he said. "With this switch, you can get full Layer 3 on every port at wire-speed."

Phil Mogavero, president and CEO of Woodland Hills, Calif.-based solution provider Data Systems Worldwide, said fitting all the features of the Summit48si into one rack unit is quite valuable. "This is an enterprise-level switch in a 1U rack-mount," Mogavero said. "When you load up Layer 3 services on an edge switch, the performance goes down. But not on these, because they are ASIC-based."

Mogavero added that because the switch supports security at the port level, it allows for more flexible virtual LAN configuration. "You can create a VLAN on a port basis, so any user can join or unjoin a VLAN regardless of where they are on the LAN," he said.