I’ve written on our site about some of the trials and tribulations I had with my previous gigabit switch. I had purchased a cheap SMC 8508T switch a while back, it died, I had to RMA it and I’ve been having very, very odd problems lately. I finally decided enough is enough and I decided to get a switch that I could manage at some level. I looked at a number of switches and the NetGear GS716T seemed to be a good compromise between price and performance.

I plugged the switch in tonight, just unplugged everything from the current switch to the new one. Everything came up no problem. The 716T is a smart switch but it doesn’t require any configuration, out of the box it will just operate as a dumb switch. After plugging in and verifying everything was working fine I installed the administrative software and it immediately found the switch and I was able to configure it for the network.

Physically the box is stable. Power supply is internal so no annoying power brick. Good compliment of lights – however I find the use of green v. yellow LED for different speeds impossible to detect on the device. Luckily I don’t really care since the web interface gives all this information and more. The two fans built into the unit are loud though. I wouldn’t want this thing where you would care about ambient noise. Rack mount ears included and it will be very stable in a rack.

The administrative interface is basic, but covers all the bases. I haven’t figured out the details of the VLAN support, trunking, QoS, etc. Not sure I even need it but will be fun to play with. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next firmware upgrade so I can get jumbo frames and basic SNMP support (need to have MRTG graphs on all the ports of course!).