HP ProCurve 2610 PWR Network Switch

Saturday, August 02, 2008

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.

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