ANTenna Blog -- Networking & Communications

Enterasys, which has been languishing in the Ethernet switching market, is trying to breathe new life into its products. To entice small and medium businesses, the company’s S-Series features high performance switching, resilient power, and enhanced management functions.

The vendor has been one of many struggling to increase its share in the highly competitive Ethernet switching marketplace. To improve its position, firm merged with Siemens Enterprise Communications Group last year, and the new products are the first fruits borne from that decision. The Enterasys S-Series’ switches come in 3-slot, 4 -slot, and 8-slot chassis, depending on the application: a network edge access switch, distribution layer switch, a multi-terabit core router, or as a data center virtualization system. The device has a total switching capacity of 1.28T bps and throughput measures 950M bps.

The switch’s Power over Ethernet (PoE) functions provision power in small increments and use only enough energy to run connected devices. A self-healing function distributes switching and routing applications across multiple modules in the event of a failure. The system automatically identifies and provisions VoIP services and works IP phones from many major vendors. For virtualized environments, the S-Series can be configured and policy-defined to identify virtual hosts supported by VMware, XenServer and HyperV hypervisors and assign ports, access controls and class of service parameters for each.

Enterasys was once one of the industry’s leading network equipment suppliers. The company has fallen upon hard times recently and been trying to put itself on more solid footing. While the new system includes some interesting features, it does not look like a true game changer. Consequently, customers interested in items, such as simpler administration, may find the switches intriguing, but for many small and medium businesses, the company will continue to be an afterthought in the switching market.