If you’re into PC gaming — or have children who are — you probably know the NETGEAR Nighthawk router. It’s a popular piece of tech in the gaming space. But you might not know that the company has a well-established presence in commercial AV over IP. They even helped found the SDVoE Alliance in 2016. But their focus now is to bring the simplicity of their esteemed consumer products to the commercial space’s fussing over IP switching.
The complexity of IP switching is well-documented. In such a crowded arena of AVoIP products, how do you choose one that stands out?
“In order to be successful in the consumer space, you really have to focus on ease-of-use and support,” says Cody Kleven, business development manager for NETGEAR.
“We’ve taken those tenets and we’ve translated them into our commercial business unit.”
M4300 switches
The company positions these as the “world’s only 1G, 10G and 40G stackable platform designed for server and audiovisual installations.”
Flexible enough for mixed stacking between 10 Gigabit and 1 Gigabit models, using any 10G port with any media type (RJ45, SFP+, DAC cables), the M4300 series offers auto-installation, including firmware and configuration file upload automation.
Related: The Industry Reacts to AVoIP Arguments
It’s also easier to sell, according to the company. One customer said: “The most important feature is the failover, the LACP links. We have redundant core switches and, if one fails or one network adapter fails, the other one can take over without problems.”
High-availability is another key differentiator for stackable solutions: in case of a master switch failure, NSF and hitless failover ensure the standby switch takes over while forwarding plane continues to forward traffic on the operational stack members without any service interruption.
10 Gigabit ports are all independent and 1G backward compatible for progressive transition to 10G speeds. — NETGEAR
Learn more in the video above, or visit the NETGEAR website.
