Today I’m going to unbox the Netgear GS108T-200 ^[1] ProSafe 8-port Gigabit Smart Switch, which I purchased last week for CAD$89.99 from ncix.com ^[2].

Note that this is the GS108T-200 ^[1] (or series 2), not the older GS108T ^[3] (or series 1), also known as the GS108T-100. The easiest way to tell the difference between them is the size and color. The 200 is silver and blue whereas the 100 is just blue. The 200 is also 3 inches narrower, taking up less space on your desk. There are other important differences, however. For example, according to Netgear’s specs ^[1], the 200 adds:

• Green features
• PoE
• SNMP version 3
• HTTPS for securely accessing the web interface

Target Market

Let’s talk about the the target market for the GS810T-200. If you go to Netgear’s website, you will find the GS108T-200 in the business ^[4] section rather than the home ^[5] section. In particular, it’s aimed at small to medium sized businesses (i.e. the SMB segment) rather than large enterprises.

Despite being labeled as a business switch, the GS108T-200 would be a good choice for your home if you’re a power user. It offers many more features than what you would find in the typical cheap unmanaged switch that most home users would buy. It’s a smart switch which means that its feature set sits somewhere between the feature sets of unmanaged switches and the fully managed switches used by large enterprises.

GS108T-200 Features

The GS108T-200′s feature list is very long so I’ll just highlight the most important features:

• 8 gigabit ports
• Can be powered by Power over Ethernet ^[6] (PoE)
• Web based administration interface, including support for HTTPS
• VLANs ^[7]
• Quality of Service ^[8] for traffic prioritization (QoS)
• Link aggregation ^[9] (trunking)
• Performance monitoring
• Port configuration
• IGMP snooping ^[10]
• ACL filtering to permit or deny traffic based on MAC or IP addresses
• Green features such as automatically powering down unused ports
• Jumbo frames ^[11]
• SNMP ^[12] version 1, 2 and 3
• Syslog ^[13] based logging
• Upgradeable firmware
• Port mirroring ^[14] (to sniff packets on another port)

Unboxing Video

Below is my GS108T-200 unboxing video from Youtube. Please leave a comment here or on the YouTube page if you liked my video.

In a few weeks I’ll post a review of the GS108T-200, after I’ve had a chance to try it out. I may also post a video tour of the administration interface.

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