Netgear FS524S Whitepaper - Page 4

The Expense of Network Downtime and Lag Time As a small business increases its dependency on the network, its employees ? and its customers ? become less tolerant of LAN downtime and sluggish response times. At a small business that sells musical CDs, for example, operators taking telephone orders typically interact with the corporate database and with the database of an outside credit-card company. When demand on the system is high (just after a radio advertisement is aired or following a catalog mailing, for instance), response time slows. A delay of a second or two is irritating, but a delay of 15 seconds or more means the small business risks losing the sale and the customer. This example illustrates how the network plays an integral role of how a small company conducts business. Not many companies can live without it. In fact, a survey conducted by the International Data Corp., a marketresearch firm in Framingham, MA., found that nearly 75% of managers consider their networks to be critical to their company's operations. Moreover, network downtime can be exceedingly expensive. In fact, by some accounts, network downtime results in financial losses that cost companies hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour. Clearly, small offices have to provide more capacity and higher reliability to their networks. But because the networks have become critical to the company, managers can't just yank everything out and start over (much as they might like to). Hence, the window of opportunity for scalable stacking technology. Features to Look for in a Stackable Switch Stackable switches offer a variety of features that may affect their suitability in a small business environment. The following sections describe some of the key features to consider before making a switch purchase decision. Backplane Speed Traffic between switches travels along a high-speed backplane. Therefore, it is important to use stackable switches that employ fast backplane speeds to maintain the highest performance to the desktop ? especially as the network grows. Load Balancing Load balancing refers to a switch's ability to distribute network traffic evenly and intelligently across the backbone that exists between two switches. In this way, load balancing ensures that traffic is distributed efficiently and effectively across the stacking connections. Fault Tolerance and Redundancy Fault tolerance and redundancy are important switch functions. With these features, the failure of one link causes the switch to automatically reroute packets to one of the remaining operational links, usually without users noticing the exchange. In this way, fault tolerance and redundancy ensure network integrity and avoid network segregation if a link goes down. The switch you select should also support "intelligent" fault-recovery capabilities, which allow it to 4