D-Link Switches

We received two network switches from D-Link, a managed and an unmanaged one.

Let's dwell on their features and analyze their performance based on the

benchmark results.

DES-3026



This is a 24 port 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet Managed Layer 2 Switch. As you would
expect from a managed network device, the switch is easy to configure through a

Web based interface. It supports all Standard L2 features such as VLANs, Link

Aggregation, IGMP Snooping, Spanning Tree, etc.

In its security features, the switch provides traffic control and

segmentation, port security, trusted hosts, etc. It also comes with some QoS

features such as IEEE 802.1P port default priority, IEEE 802.1P user priority,

etc. Port Bandwidth is another useful feature in QoS, which provides control on

transmitting and receiving data rates for any selected port.

Price and Warranty: DGS-1024D: Rs 15,000 (1 yr); DES-3026: Rs 23,000 (1 yr)

Meant For: Managed switch for SMBs and unmanaged for data centers

Key Specs: Managed switch is Fast Ethernet and supports QoS, VLAN, link aggregation, etc, while unmanaged is 24-port, Gbe, with auto-negotiation and flow control

Pros: Managed switch is easy to configure, good management software

Cons: None

Contact: D-Link India, MumbaiTel: 26526696Email id: sales@dlink.co.in

The product also ships with D-View SNMP network management software. This

software has useful tools that allow you to effectively manage device

configurations, fault tolerance, and security. For non-D-Link switches, it has

an MIB compiler to compile MIB files of the third party device into a

system-recognized format.

We stressed the switch with NetIQ Qcheck. It gave an average throughput of 94

Mbps and a maximum throughput of '96 Mbps' in an isolated network while

transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to another and in a response

time of 1ms. Overall, the switch is very easy to use and configure.

DGS-1024D



This one is a plug n play 24-port unmanaged Layer 2 Gigabit Ethernet Switch. It
supports IEEE 802.3 Ethernet, 802.3u Fast Ethernet, 802.3x Flow Control and

802.3ab Gigabit Ethernet standards. According to D-Link, it has a MAC Address

table size of 8K to facilitate scalability. The larger the MAC address table

size the larger the number of networks that the switch can support.

According to D-Link, this switch provides flow control for full-duplex mode,

and back pressure flow control for half-duplex mode which eases traffic

congestion and ensures reliable data transmission. The back-pressure flow

control allows loss-free transmission by having gateways verify that the next

gateway has sufficient buffer space available before sending data.

It also has Auto-Negotiation on its each port, which senses the link speed of

a network device connected (either 10, 100 or 1000 Mbps) and ensures

compatibility of the port's speed with that of the network device.

Its each port supports a cable diagnostic feature which informs the user

about cable related problems through LED's. However, this feature is only

available at Switch Bootup.

This switch was again tested using NetIQ's Qcheck. It gave an average

throughput of 728 Mbps on transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end to

another, which is pretty much similar to the other Gigabit switches we have

tested in the past.

Bottom Line: Considering its performance and features, DGS-1024D

switch is ideal for briskly adding Gigabit Ethernet LAN functionality to your

servers, network backbone connections, etc, even though the price is a little

high. The managed DES-3026 switch has customizable features and its performance

and price make it worth a buy.

Swapnil Arora