The 8600 series switches are Layer 3 switches with Layer 2/3/4+ intelligence. These desktop multimedia switches bring a high level of security and traffic control to the edge of your network.
With IP routing capabilities for Investment Protection and flexible management tools, the 8600 series is designed as a cost effective solution for today, with the ability to expand as network demands grow - at no extra cost.
The 8600 series switches are high-performance edge/access switches designed to provide desktop connectivity for enterprise workgroups, mid-sized networks, and high school and campus networks. More demanding customers in these segments will benefit from the Layer 2 - 4 awareness of the 8600 series, which supports multimedia applications like voice and video.
These intelligent switches include Quality of Service (QoS) features, such as wirespeed Layer 2/3/4+ traffic classifiers, bandwidth limiting, Diffserv and Hardware Access control lists, which are particularly useful for multitenant unit, multi-business unit, Telco or Network Service Provider applications.
The 8600 series switches include a powerful feature set. All 8600 Layer 3 switches include a suite of advanced switching features such as IEEE 802.1Q VLAN Tagging, IGMPv2, IEEE 802.1p Traffic Prioritization of packets at Layer 2, and broadcast storm protection.
All 8600 series switches come with asymmetric, bidirectional bandwidth limiting at no additional cost. This is an ideal feature for customers needing to allocate the amount of bandwidth on a per port basis. With bandwidth limiting, network administrators can define throughput levels for each port and control access based on the type of end user. These features are ideal for managing different applications like VoIP, Web browsing, video, e-mail, and to regain control of traffic across the network. The bandwidth limiting on the 8600 series provides fine granularity with the ability to define ingress limits down to 64kbps segments and egress limits down to 1Mbps segments. The segment definitions can be asymmetric and each port can be set to different values. An additional benefit is that loop back ports are not required.
The 8600 series switches enable a cost effective network by efficiently using bandwidth from the access edge to the core. These switches accomplish this with a combination of traffic prioritization and security filtering, ensuring that rogue traffic is not forwarded and preventing unnecessary load on the network backbone and central servers.
A rich set of features is included to provide full support for multimedia Layer 4 applications. All switches include Layer 3 IP Static Routing, RIP, RIPv2, IGMPv2 and OSPFv2 routing protocols.
The 8600 series offers an extensive suite of management capabilities allowing simple configuration, advanced customizable triggers with an e-mail client and full SNMP and MIB support for unmatched flexibility in monitoring and controlling events.
Stacking provides Web and CLI-based management of up to nine switches with the same effort as for one switch. The Allied Telesis solution uses open standards interfaces as stacking links so that many switches can be stacked across different sites, which is not possible using the proprietary stacking cable solutions. Also, the use of open standards interfaces avoids the use of expensive specialized hardware with limited topologies.