HP ProCurve 2610 PWR Network Switch

This is a 28-port managed Fast Ethernet switch which is IEEE 802.3 af

compliant for PoE. The switch has 24 standard 10/100 Base ports, two 1000 Base

Ethernet ports, and two mini-GBIC ports for uplinking to a higher Gigabit

Ethernet backbone. It supports Link Aggregation and Multiple Spanning Tree

protocols. The switch delivers PoE of 15.4 watts through first 12-ports only,

which can be used to supply power to small devices like wireless access points,

hubs or phones. The switch is not shipped with any default IP address, but

acquires one when connected to a DHCP network. For initial configuration one

needs to access the switch through Command Line Interface (CLI) using Telnet as

all management controls aren't provided for the web interface; for instance,

setting for maximum VLAN support. The CLI is menu driven and so one doesn't need

to remember all commands. The web browser interface provides QoS, PoE

configuration, stacking etc, and other options for security and diagnostic

tests. We tested the switch using NetIQ QCheck. On an isolated network it gave a

throughput of 94.118 Mbps, transferring 1000 Kb of payload from one end to

another with 1 ms response time. We overloaded the switch with excessive traffic

and it still gave an average throughput of 75 Mbps which shows it's designed to

handle congested networks. The performance is almost identical to DAX DX-5728MG

(reviewed in May 07), only the latter lacks PoE.

Bottomline: With these features, performance and the lifetime

warranty, this is ideal for mid-sized enterprises.