Basics of SWITCH

BASIC OF A SWITCH

A switch or network switch or called as LAN switch is a device that connects network devices as like hubs, Its more than a HUB. Its also referred as multi-port  network bridge.

• Switches operate at data link or network layer of OSI layer.
• It connects different type of network like ethernet ,fiber.
• A layer-2 switch provides hardware based bridging and uses application specific integrated circuits  ( ASICs).
• It is used to breakup the collision Domain.

• Switches create separate collision domain but a single broadcast domain.
• Main purpose of using a switch is to optimize the LAN performance and providing better bandwidth to LAN users. They only switch frame packets from one port to another.
• Switches provide dedicated collision domain and also independent bandwidth on each port.
• It comes with many Ports like hub, 12,24,28,  etc.
• Different vendors have different switches for wired and wireless LAN like Cisco, D-Link, Juniper ,Huawei, Aruba.
• Same as routers there also series of switches in cisco and other vendors.

In networking the switch is represented as symbol like :-

 

There are basic three switch Functions at layer-2 and are :

1.Address Learning

2.Forward/filter decisions

3.Loop avoidance

More information can be referred at section Basics of Switching under this Blog.

RPS

RPS a product from Cisco is Redundant Power System. It provides power supply redundancy and resiliency for switches and routers power requirement through POE (Power over Ethernet) mode.

Basically the RPS was used for catalyst models such as 3750-E, 3560-E. It avoids network downtime by preventing switch reboot after a internal switch failure. It is ease of use and ease of deployment. 

Virtual Switch:

Now a days there are virtual switches introduced in the market. A virtual switch works with virtual NIC. The virtual NIC is is software linked with unique MAC address that can be later used by a virtual machine to send and receive packets. 

-DR