Management Features

• Cisco, one of the largest manufacturers of managed switches, presents switch management features using the Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP allows you to sit at a central location and remotely monitor and repair network switches. This is especially helpful if you have switches in dangerous industrial settings or a wide area network with locations geographically separated. Some systems can be programmed to notify you in the event of a switch failure so you can repair the switch quickly. Additionally, some switches allow you to view and report traffic per port so you can determine if any port is reaching saturation and needs to be adjusted.
  
  

Quality of Service

• This feature allows you to prioritize the service for critical traffic. This could be prioritizing industrial motion traffic, or in other words, equipment running machines or managing assembly lines. Voice over IP is often prioritized so voice packets do not get dropped. Streaming video is another feature that is often prioritized. An alternative to using a managed switch with quality of service is to completely separate the functions. Separate switches are often used with industrial motion traffic, for example.
  
  

Redundancy

• Managed switches offer redundancy. It is also referred to as Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol or simply Spanning Tree Protocol. These protocols allow an alternative cabling path in the event a cable or a connection fails. It also prevents loops which can bog down or stop a network.
  
  

Virtual Local Area Network

• Using VLAN technology, you can virtually segment your switch logically. In other words, you can put finance in one group and marketing in another. This allows data to finance to flow smoothly without getting slowed by marketing traffic.
  
  

Port Mirroring

• Port mirroring allows you to troubleshoot port problems in combination with a network analyzer. It copies the network traffic on a single port and allows you to examine the traffic on that port without removing it from the network.