NETGEAR ProSafe S3300 Switches Series Overview

Since the beginning of the technology era we are witnessing constant growth in development of new solutions to ease our living and improve our businesses. Today we are living in an era of smart appliances and hardware. We are constantly surrounded by growing number of smart devices connected to a certain kind of network, constantly communicating with other devices which can either be nearby or on the Internet. This trend of developing new and advanced smart devices slowly but surely took its share of the networking market. Many leading vendors realized that they can also implement smart features in their devices and thus facilitate the whole networking process. One of those vendors is Netgear. They decided to make a bold move and develop smart networking devices.

One of their most successful devices is the ProSafe s3300 Series Switch. This switch is a newest generation of gigabit stackable switches providing your company with a stackable solution which supports 10G network traffic, at a reasonable price. This switch series represents a new series of an economical alternative to provide companies the option to make that valuable extra step towards 10 Gigabit networking. This switch gives your company the option of using both fiber and copper solutions. With 2 SFP+ ports enabled by default, this switch series will give the extra bandwidth for your uplink ports without sacrificing the power of the other regular gigabit ports. Every port of the s3300 series switches has been carefully developed to provide maximum power efficiency which eventually results in big cost savings.

The Stacking Technology- Pros and Cons One of the deal breaking features of the s3300 series switches, besides the smart functionality and low cost, is the stackable option. This switch series offers you the possibility to stack up to six independent switches and achieve bi-directional bandwidth of up to 40G. In addition the Netgear stacking solution gives you the built-in redundancy and auto-failover features enabled by default. This stacking technology offers you some key advantages for managing your network architecture:

• You have the option of implementing the virtual chassis technology which gives you the opportunity to manage every switch in the stack as a single virtual switch with a single IP address. This gives you the much needed flexibility for future network expansion.
• This technology offers you the resiliency for many devices that need it like servers, downstream switches, or other important devices. They would be connected to the stack with EtherChannel while the ports in the EtherChannel are spread across every switch in the stack.
• Another advantage is the option of using different port speed and media type without using bigger and additional chassis.

Even though switch stacking is a proved method of managing and simplifying your network architecture, it surely has some disadvantages:

• Depending on the model of the switch, these stacks can consume a lot of power. This is significantly noticeable when Power over Ethernet is enabled.
• The main issue that might occur in this solution is the possible bottleneck of performance. This is especially frequent when a large quantity of traffic is travelling across multiple switches in the stack. That’s why it’s highly advised for these switches to be interconnected by the 10GB ports for maximum decrease of the bottlenecked performance.

Netgear S3300 Models The s3300 switch series provides a solid ground for a dependable and future proof network. You can choose one of a couple different switch platforms: S3300-28X, S3300-28X-PoE+, S3300-52X, and S3300-52X-PoE+. Each of these four models offers different features:

• The S3300-28X is a switch offering 24 GE ports and 4 dedicated 10G ports. Out of these 4 dedicated ports 2 are copper and 2 are fiber ports. This particular switch doesn’t have the Power over Ethernet capability (PoE).
• The S3300-28X-PoE+ is the same switch with additional Power over Ethernet feature. It also provides 24 ports with 4 dedicated 10G ports, both copper and fiber. In addition this model comes with 2 cooling fans instead of one. Because of the PoE feature and the PoE budget of 195 Watts, this model has significantly more power consumption of 748.18 Watts.
• The S3300-52X is a 52 port switch offering 48 GE ports and 4 10G copper and fiber ports. Except for the port density, this switch is entirely the same as the S3300-28X.
• The S3300-52X-PoE+ is a Power over Ethernet version of the 52 port switch with higher power consumption and PoE on all of its ports. It has a total PoE budget of 390 Watts.

One of the unique features of these switches is their management. Every switch model is managed through a web-based GUI or a Smart Control Center.

The manufacturer CBO from Germany produces high quality networking equipment under the brand BlueOptics, meeting every high industrial and Multi Source Agreement standards. They provide the ultimate support for your network architecture. They manufacture OEM transceivers compatible with every Netgear s3300 Switch model. The transceivers supported by the Netgear s3300 models and their CBO BlueOptics equivalents are shown in the table below: