NETGEAR Introduces Industry-First Line of Gigabit Smart Switches for SMBs with Power-over-Ethernet and Stacking Capabilities

NETGEAR’s New Advanced Smart Switches Deliver IP Network Convergence with Scalability and High-Performance for SMBs

SAN JOSE, Calif. — NETGEAR®, Inc. (NASDAQGM: NTGR), a worldwide provider of technologically innovative, branded networking solutions, today announced two new ProSafe® Advanced Gigabit Smart Switches, the GS724TPS and GS748TPS. They are the industry’s first and only Gigabit Smart Switches designed for Small- to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) that combine Gigabit connectivity, Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and stacking, all on the same platform, making them ideal for supporting converged networks.

More and more SMB customers are recognizing the benefits of converged networks that include wireless, VoIP and data, not only for cost-savings, but also for business efficiency and enhanced services. The GS7xxTPS series is designed to help SMBs easily migrate their current infrastructure to a converged network that may include wireless LANs, VoIP phones or IP-PBXs and video teleconferencing. With PoE capabilities on all ports and Auto Voice VLAN features, the switches can help customers to easily set up the PoE-enabled IP phones and wireless access points wherever they want, without changing the wiring infrastructure. In addition, the first four ports on each switch can also support PoE+, based on the IEEE802.3at draft standards, providing up to 30W to higher-powered PoE devices such as multichannel wireless access points, pan-tilt-zoomed IP cameras, and touch-screen IP phones. One GS7xxTPS switch provides SMBs with all their PoE needs now as well as for the future.

“As SMBs continue to leverage VoIP, wireless and other converged network technologies to make their businesses more productive and streamline their networks, they require advanced switching infrastructure that supports their needs now and in the future,” said Maggie Wu, NETGEAR’s product line manager for Smart Switching Products. “Our ProSafe GS7xxTPS Series of Advanced Gigabit Smart Switches meets these requirements to support key applications such as VoIP-based call centers, branch/remote offices and organizations with unified wireless and wireline networks. The GS7xxTPS series offers performance, ease-of-use, scalability, and reliability by supporting the right combination of features at an affordable cost.”

Designed for high performance, easy management and scalability, the GS7xxTPS series are the industry’s only Stackable Smart Gigabit Switches. There are two dedicated HDMI ports delivering up to 20 Gbps stacking bandwidth on each switch. Customers can stack up to 6 switches or 288 ports together and manage them with a single IP address. The stacking features also include redundancy and are hot-swappable. Since they are extensions of the same NETGEAR Gigabit Stackable Smart Switch family, the GS724TPS and GS748TPS can be stacked with the GS7xxTS switches (GS724TS and GS748TS), and provide greater investment protection to customers.

As members of the NETGEAR ProSafe Advanced Smart Switch family, GS724TPS and GS748TPS also come with a complete suite of advanced features such as access control lists (ACL), 802.1x port authentication, enhanced QoS, rate limiting and IGMP snooping, among others, to provide SMB businesses with more robust security, higher quality of service and high availability. An intuitive, Web-browser interface provides simple yet comprehensive management, making it a snap to fully realize the potential of the rich feature-set offered by these switches.

“Until we went with NETGEAR, we were unclear how to approach a converged network deployment, since the infrastructure features we needed were out of our price range,” said Gary Howell, managing technical director of Morgan Walsh Consultancy Limited. “Since installation, the GS7xxTPS Stackable Switches have operated flawlessly, providing high performance network connectivity across multiple VLANS, with really easy administration. We couldn’t have asked for a better solution.”

Additional features for the GS7xxTPS line include:

“Smart” Management Features:
SMBs can manage all ProSafe Gigabit Stackable Smart Switches as though they were one unit, from an easy-to-use Web console that can be used to configure all features, as well as monitor and troubleshoot. (Features include single IP address, automatic master back-up, automatic firmware synchronization across stack and master maintains configuration for entire stack.) These switches also have SNMP (v1, 2 and 3) to collect and track data to monitor the network health, as well as manage devices, and more easily enforce critical IT controls and policies. SNMP v2c is most commonly deployed, as it provides better reporting capabilities than SNMP v1. Companies interested in more robust security may opt for SNMP v3, which provides data encryption. These switches can also be managed with NETGEAR ProSafe Network Management Software (NMS100) and work with other SNMP-based management software.

Advanced Security:
These switches also provide advanced features that provide more robust security to SMBs. These include 802.1x for authentication and ACL filtering to permit or deny traffic based on MAC and/or IP addresses.

Advanced Quality of Service (QoS):
Priority queuing ensures high-priority traffic gets delivered efficiently, even during congestion from high traffic bursts. Companies implementing network telephony or video conferencing, for example, need to be able to prioritize such voice and video traffic and other real-time applications over less latency-sensitive traffic to ensure reliability and quality. The ability to prioritize traffic ensures the quality of latency-sensitive services and applications despite increasing traffic loads. The ProSafe Gigabit Stackable Smart Switches provide an extensive set of QoS features such as 802.1p-based prioritization; Layer 3-based (DSCP) prioritization; and rate-limiting.

“SMBs need solutions that are powerful enough to help growing networks support converged applications, but that are designed for companies without enterprise IT resources,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst of enterprise voice and data at Infonetics. “Products such as NETGEAR’s Stackable Smart Switches feature SMB-focused tools that streamline network operations while still delivering enterprise functionality, thereby enabling SMBs to transition to converged networks.”

With full 24/7 technical support that connects SMBs directly with experienced switching experts, the NETGEAR ProSafe GS7xx Series of Advanced Gigabit Ethernet Smart Switches will give SMBs a powerful new tool to grow their businesses. The GS724TPS and the GS748TPS will be available worldwide in July 2009 from value-added resellers and leading direct marketers at estimated U.S. street prices starting from $899.99 and $1,699.99, respectively. All ProSafe products provide world-class reliability with a NETGEAR Lifetime Warranty and optional ProSupport Maintenance Packages. More information on NETGEAR’s full line of ProSafe Advanced Smart Switches is available at (http://www.netgear.com/Products/Switches/AdvancedSmartSwitches.aspx).