Netgear ProSafe GS752TPP
A huge Ethernet switch that’s stacked with features – and capable of powering a whole fleet of PoE devices
SCORE PRICE £567 exc VAT from lambda-tek.com
With the rise of VoIP, network cameras, IoT devices and smart lighting, Power over Ethernet (PoE) is becoming a musthave for business networks. Netgear’s ProSafe GS752TPP is the perfect powered switch for SMEs preparing to support the coming influx of singlecable devices.
Positioned at the top of Netgear’s Smart Managed Pro switch family, the GS752TPP provides a huge 48 PoE-enabled Gigabit Ethernet ports – and its generous 760W power budget means it can feed the full 15.4W to all of them at once. It can even support a large number of PoE+ devices, such as high-power Wave 2 wireless APs and HD IP cameras.
If that’s not enough connectivity for you, there are also four SFP fibre Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be used alongside the copper ports, perhaps as fault-tolerant uplinks to the network backbone.
Installation is as plug and play as it gets. Netgear’s free Smart Control Centre utility can discover and manage all the manufacturer’s switches from a single interface, and also includes controls to upgrade the unit’s firmware, save and restore configuration files, and open your switch’s web-based management interface.
The ProSafe GS752TPP’s console is nicely designed, providing easy access to all features. It opens with an overview of the hardware, showing the status of the unit’s three quiet cooling fans; switching to the Device View page brings up a visual representation of the switch, with coloured icons giving an at-a-glance indication of each port’s connection, speed and PoE status.
For a closer look at the latter, you can then drop into the Advanced PoE section, which provides a wealth of information about powered devices and usage. After attaching a range of wireless APs and IP cameras, we were able to browse each one’s detected device class, and monitor its individual power consumption in watts, milliamps and volts.
You can also use the console’s power controls to determine which ports are allowed to supply power, or set schedules to make particular ports power up and shut down at specific times. If you’re taxing the switch with a lot of power-hungry devices, each port can be assigned one of four power priorities; if the total power drain reaches the switch’s threshold, the ports with the lowest priority will be automatically switched off first. You can set power limits for selected ports, and optionally send out SNMP traps if a global power consumption threshold is exceeded.
Functionally, the GS752TPP is a “Layer 3 Light” switch, which means
“If the total power drain reaches the switch’s threshold, the ports with the lowest priority will be switched off first”
it supports all Layer 2 features, plus basic Layer 3 routing capabilities – but it lacks the dynamic routing of more costly full Layer 3 switches.
Still, the GS752TPP does everything most small businesses will need, including static IPv4 and IPv6 routing, inter-VLAN local routing and ARP services. Port, MAC and protocol-based VLANs are all supported, and the switch can even create VLANs specifically for VoIP, with traffic using SIP or your VoIP OUI (organisationally unique identifier) being automatically prioritised.
You can also assign priorities to individual ports, with a minimum bandwidth applied to each one. The switch supports 802.1p and can map packets to the required priority queue, allowing class of service (CoS) controls to be applied to similar types of traffic.
As a final feather in its cap, the GS752TPP supports a good range of security models: administrative access can be controlled using RADIUS, TACACS+ or 802.1x port authentication, and unauthenticated users can be passed onto a guest VLAN with limited network access. A DHCP snooping feature also blocks rogue DHCP servers, ensuring that clients only receive IP addresses from authorised servers.
The GS752TPP certainly isn’t the only device in its class, but it’s far cheaper than its rivals: Cisco’s 48-port SG30052MP offers similar Layer 2 and static routing features, along with an almost identical 740W power budget, but it comes in at twice the price. If you’re planning on a highdensity PoE deployment, or just want to be ready for one, Netgear’s ProSafe GS752TPP should be at the top of your list.
SPECIFICATIONS 1U rack chassis 700MHz MIPS-34Kc CPU 128MB DDR RAM 32MB Flash 48 x copper Gigabit Ethernet with PoE/PoE+ 4 x Gigabit Ethernet SFP 760W total power budget 802.3af/at PoE 104Gbits/sec backplane capacity 1.5MB packet buffer 16K MAC addresses 256 VLANs internal PSU web-based management console limited lifetime warranty