Unmanaged and Managed Network Equipment

In the networking world there are two general types of network equipment unmanaged and managed. Conventionally consumer grade hardware is designed to merge multiple systems into one residential switches, routers, or modems / routers are actually a type of combined device acting as a switch, router and WiFi access point.

Un-managed

These are typically what I will deploy in customers residential homes which don't need the level of control needed from a managed device, these simply take traffic in one port then pass that traffic to all the other ports local to that switch. This way you can convert for example if you have a router with one available port it will allow you to have 4 or more extra ports connected to that one port, now this can be a little bit of a problem the more devices you have the more bandwidth is required support all those devices but typically unmanaged switches are unlikely to support any form of advanced bandwidth capabilities beyond a single unmanaged 1Gbps port. So in an unmanaged configuration if you have 1 port occupied as the uplink port as it's known as and you have 5 other devices connected to your 8 port switch, it will divide the available bandwidth per port to 1Gbps / 8 = 1000Mbps / 8 = 125Mbps per port. you will not be getting the benefit of the full capabilities of your network switch this is typically why in enterprise infrastructure they use what we call dedicated uplink ports or where link aggregation is leveraged.

Unmanaged network equipment

Managed

Are what is commonly deployed in business settings, the main reason for this is because managed switches support a very wide range of features, often having the ability to configure advanced forwarding states, often via command-line or GUI, many of the top enterprise series network switches are done via command line configuration. Most residential customers typically don't need this unless of course your are like me and just have an enterprise network just for fun and learning what is commonly known as a home-lab. To add more information (you don't need to understand this unless a business) managed switches often support VLANs, link-state assignment, remote management, security controls, port-security and many others. A managed switch gives you unparalleled control over how your local network operates in a business setting managed equipment can also be configured to isolate elements of networks from each other as a security feature. For a business managed equipment offers huge benefits including vendor based integration and cooperation typically deploying managed hardware means you'll choose a vendor which can provide everything you need. For smaller businesses there is a number of providers of very capable equipment including CISCO, Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, Netgear and Juniper. Ubiquiti is typically the cheapest option with the most capability and ease of use and you can also choose to use their all in one solution called Unifi which includes security gateways, routers, switches and WiFi AP's, however Mikrotik is great value for money but has a much larger configuration barrier to entry. I personally use Mikrotik because I love the level of control offered, Mikrotik even offer advanced routing capabilities commonly found on far more expensive hardware such as MPLS (multiprotocol label switching)

Managed Network Equipment

Contact me today to see what can be done with your small business or home network.