Switches must be increasingly faster to meet the speed needs of social networks. Years ago, having a 10G switch was the highest range in networks, however, today it is the norm, even in domestic environments we can now have a 10G Multigigabit network without having to spend a lot of money. Now the manufacturer QNAP has launched the QNAP QSW-M7308R-4X model, a high-performance device that includes 100G ports. Do you want to know all the features of this model?
We already have one of the first QNAP manageable switches with 100G ports, a speed that will allow us to transfer data at high speed. These models with 100G ports are specifically aimed at medium and large companies that need high wired speed. Considering the cost of the hardware, and not only the switch, but also the cabling and network cards, this type of equipment is too powerful for home environments.
Main features
The main features of this manageable switch are that it includes a total of 4 100G ports with QSFP28 connectors. It also has a total of 8 25GbE ports with SFP28 connectors. Thanks to these ports, we can achieve very high wired speeds. The most common way to connect the ports to 25GbE is to connect them to end devices such as servers or professional PCs, while the 100G ports will be used as trunks to other switches or to the main router.
This manageable switch also has an out-of-band Gigabit Ethernet port, so that the switch can be managed locally. This way, we can connect a PC via network cable to the equipment to manage it, without that traffic passing through the ports dedicated to providing the service. In a business network, it is very common to design a management network, either with a VLAN or with a physical network, in order to access the administration of all the equipment.
Other features of this switch are that it has a MAC address table of up to 32K entries, we have a total non-blocking throughput of 600Gbps and a switching capacity of 1,200Gbps. This equipment supports Jumbo Frames at 9K, to achieve the best wired performance with these very fast ports at 100G and 25G. Normally this type of switches with such fast ports have a high consumption, in this case, according to QNAP the maximum energy consumption is 55Wh, it has an internal power supply so we will power it through 230V alternating current. As for cooling, it has 2 smart fans that are activated based on the internal temperature of the equipment.
This switch has a half-rack form factor, meaning its dimensions are 43.3mm high, 207mm wide, and 248.8mm deep. Being a half-rack, we could place another exactly the same switch in 1U, or any other QNAP model with this form factor, for greater versatility. For example, we could have this 100G switch in the same U, and then another switch with PoE ports to power different devices. The weight of this model is 1.78Kg.
The software built into this switch is the same QSS operating system as always. We will have at our disposal the possibility of configuring Link Aggregation, VLANs, configuring ACLs based on IP and MAC, we also have LLDP, and we can even configure QoS, IGMP Snooping and also RSTP to avoid loops at the link layer. In the following image, you can see what the graphical user interface looks like.
At RedesZone we have analyzed several QNAP manageable switches, in this case, the graphical user interface is exactly the same as always, nothing has changed in this regard.
