NETGEAR FS524S Release Note page 4

The Expense of Network Downtime and Lag Time
As a small business increases its dependency on the network, its
employees and its customers become less tolerant of LAN downtime
and sluggish response times. At a small business that sells musical CDs,
for example, operators taking telephone orders typically interact with
the corporate database and with the database of an outside credit-card
company. When demand on the system is high (just after a radio
advertisement is aired or following a catalog mailing, for instance),
response time slows. A delay of a second or two is irritating, but a
delay of 15 seconds or more means the small business risks losing the
sale and the customer. This example illustrates how the network plays an
integral role of how a small company conducts business. Not many
companies can live without it.
In fact, a survey conducted by the International Data Corp., a market-
research firm in Framingham, MA., found that nearly 75% of managers
consider their networks to be critical to their company's operations.
Moreover, network downtime can be exceedingly expensive. In fact, by
some accounts, network downtime results in financial losses that cost
companies hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour.
Clearly, small offices have to provide more capacity and higher
reliability to their networks. But because the networks have become
critical to the company, managers can't just yank everything out and
start over (much as they might like to). Hence, the window of
opportunity for scalable stacking technology.
Features to Look for in a Stackable Switch
Stackable switches offer a variety of features that may affect their
suitability in a small business environment. The following sections
describe some of the key features to consider before making a switch
purchase decision.
Backplane Speed
Traffic between switches travels along a high-speed backplane.
Therefore, it is important to use stackable switches that employ fast
backplane speeds to maintain the highest performance to the desktop
especially as the network grows.
Load Balancing
Load balancing refers to a switch's ability to distribute network
traffic evenly and intelligently across the backbone that exists between
two switches. In this way, load balancing ensures that traffic is
distributed efficiently and effectively across the stacking connections.
Fault Tolerance and Redundancy
Fault tolerance and redundancy are important switch functions. With
these features, the failure of one link causes the switch to
automatically reroute packets to one of the remaining operational links,
usually without users noticing the exchange. In this way, fault
tolerance and redundancy ensure network integrity and avoid network
segregation if a link goes down. The switch you select should also
support "intelligent" fault-recovery capabilities, which allow it to
4