One of the first new releases of 2016 from Meraki fills a major gap in their product lineup, and is well worth investigating for medium-to-large size businesses seeing their network grow beyond just a few pieces of hardware.
The new Meraki MS410-32 is a high-capacity aggregation switch based around Gigabit speed connections. Previously, the MS400 line was focused on 10Gb speeds, which made them prohibitively expensive except for the very high-end networking. This switch, however, is far more accessible and could see a lot of use among growing organizations that don't need such massive amounts of bandwidth.
This new Meraki switch release also signals that Meraki is truly dedicated to serving every corner of the networking market with a product line that can grow alongside a company, from a single-office startup all the way to a global presence.
A First Look At The Meraki MS410-32 Aggregation Switch
As the name suggests, the switch features thirty-two 1G SFP LAN ports, which have bandwidth provided by up to four 10-Gigabit uplinks. This gives it a total capacity of 144Gbps of non-blocked switching. Even better, it supports local physical stacking, allowing stacks of up to eight units.
Or, of course, virtual stacking allows potentially hundreds of devices to be linked together.
By itself, this could make the Meraki MS410-32 an excellent option for a wide range of schools, campuses, healthcare facilities, hotels, and other organizations that are seeing their bandwidth and networking demands steadily increase. It could be deployed either as a central part of their main rack, or as a branch-level aggregator for multi-site businesses.
Meraki recognizes this could be mission-critical hardware, and made expansion and maintenance as easy as possible. They utilize redundant dual fans and power supplies, which are also hot-swappable and field-replaceable. A separate RJ45 jack allows direct management local connection in case of emergency.
Once the switch is hooked up, there's very little reason to take it offline.
Smaller operations might also be interested in the MS410-16, the "little brother" in this lineup, which is nearly identical except that it has sixteen LAN ports, two SFP+ uplinks, and a total capacity of 72Gbps.
Meraki Means Simplicity In Deployment And Usage
The other thing that would make the Meraki MS410 attractive to growing organizations is that no company makes large-scale networking easier than Meraki. While there are plenty of low-end SMB-aimed network devices with simple interfaces, This platform allows even the largest of networks to be maintained through a single GUI.
There's no command line and no need for extensive technical expertise. Any relatively competent Windows user can learn to administrate a Meraki network quickly, while still taking advantage of its robust configuration options.
The virtualized mesh-based network fabric Meraki utilizes means that installation of the switch or subsequent devices are a snap. It's truly plug-and-play. Once the initial configuration is completed, all new hardware installations automatically initialize based off the global pre-sets. As more equipment is added to the network, it adjusts itself for optimal performance with very little administrative oversight needed.
Meraki's smart OS even takes care of its own software, OS, and (if installed) security system updates, downloading them automatically from the cloud.
All in all, it is a great Meraki switch and another great addition to their lineup. If you're interested in the possibilities of Meraki mesh-based networking, just contact Hummingbird Networks and we can set you up with a free in-office trial.
