HP ProCurve— 1800 24G Switch

This is a Gigabit Ethernet switch with 22 auto-sensing 10/100/1000 ports and

2 dual-personality ports for RJ-45 10/100/1000 or mini-GBIC fiber Gigabit

connectivity. It offers packet support for up to 9216 byte frame size for

improved performance in large data transfers. It has a fan-less design for quiet

operation.

The switch supports 8,000 entries in its MAC address table. It also supports

traffic prioritization and broadcast control to ensure QoS. It has a

browser-based management interface that is easy to configure and use. We could

create VLANs through this browser interface and up to 64 VLANs can be configured

in a few clicks. The interface is very detailed and helps in monitoring the

switch as well. There are locater LEDs for each port which help in cable

diagnostics and troubleshooting.

We tested the switch with NetIQ QCheck and were able to get an average

throughput of 571 Mbps for transferring 1,000 KB of payload from one end to the

another and with a response time of 1 ms. While the maximum throughput was

666Mbps, which was less compared to 728 Mbps achieved by DLink DGS-1024D

(reviewed July,2006). When we stressed the switch by flooding it with excessive

traffic, the average throughput dropped to 320 Mbps only.

Bottomline: The switch with its price and manageability options is ideal

for small data centers.