Extreme Networks Summit X250e-24P

This switch has the ability to handle voice traffic for telecom service

providers and data centers. It has 24 10/100 ports, and two shared Gigabit

Ethernet ports. The X250e series switches are stackable and so there are two

stacking interfaces provided at the back.

The switch provides high availability and performance with its advanced

traffic management features like modular operating system and redundant power

supply. ExtremeXOS, the modular operating system that it comes bundled with,

monitors each independent OS process and in case any of them halts, it

automatically restarts the process resulting in continuous network uptime. It

also has support for EAPS (Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching) that allows

the network to recover from failovers within a fraction of a second. This

ensures that VoIP calls or digital video feeds transmitted do not drop or freeze

due to link fail-over on the network.

The Summit 250e-24P supports Power over Ethernet and can be used by devices

that require power from LAN connections, such as IP telephones. The switch also

supports the standard Layer 2 and Layer 3 features such as Spanning Tree

Protocol, Link Aggregation, DHCP and Quality of Service (QoS). Other two

features, MAC filtering and port mirroring, make it a more secure device to

connect your wares with. Especially MAC filtering, which allows a port to be

dedicated to a given MAC address and locked for any new network device, thus

preventing network attacks from frequently changing MAC addresses.

The switch doesn't get shipped with a default IP. That has to be configured

through its Command Line Interface (CLI). Once the IP has been configured, the

switch can be managed through CLI or a Web interface, called ExtremeXOS

Screenplay. The latter interface is quite detailed and provides functionalities

to configure VLANs, set policies for ports and monitor them, and view statistics

related to network traffic.

We tested the switch using NetIQ Qcheck in an isolated network. It gave a

throughput of 94.118 Mbps for transferring 1000 Kbytes of payload from one end

to the other. And when we flooded the switch with excessive traffic over some

ports and checked its throughput on other ports, it still managed a decent 94

Mbps. This means the switch is intelligent enough to isolate ports having

excessive traffic, so that throughput over other ports is not hampered.

Along with Summit X250e-24P we also received another switch from the X250e

series, the Summit X250e-48T. This switch has mostly similar features but twice

the number of 10/100 ports, however, it does not support Power over Ethernet.

The price is also same as that of X250e-24P and the performance is equally good.

Bottomline: Its performance and features

make it ideal for networks where VoIP or high density data streaming are used.