Strengths: Great gigabit port density and trunking capability at a very low price! Stacking up to 6 units allows a flexible port count, from 48 to 288. The 20Gbps loop stacking port is much faster than the 8Gbps trunks, that most Layer2 switches are limited to.

Weaknesses: Link Aggregation Groups can be difficult to configure. Sometimes the web configuration spreads related configuration options between different pages.

Summary: If you have a small company network, this is the switch to buy, especially when you plan to grow. You can start out with one 48-port switch, with a very good per-port cost and gigabit performance. Then you can add more switches as needed, to handle up to 288 devices on the same LAN. You can even use the stack as a massive workgroup switch, as part of a larger network -- by utilizing port trunking, with optional fiber connectors, to connect to enterprise management switches farther up the organizational tree. You can also utilize port trunking methods (like LACP) to connect multi-adapter servers, for up to 8Gbps bandwidth to each server. Such 8Gbps trunked connections are still much cheaper than 10Gbps adapters, with better redundancy to prevent failures.

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