Netgear ProSafe Plus XS708E review

Dave Mitchell Read more September 10, 2013

£700

Price when reviewed

It’s been a long time coming, but 10GbE networking has finally become an affordable option for SMBs. Netgear’s new ProSafe Plus XS708E is equipped with eight 10GBaseT copper ports, yet costs less than £600.

The eight-port XS708E is the entry point in a family of three new 10GbE products from Netgear. The 12-port XS712T switch costs just more than £1,000, and its enterprise offering is the 24-port XSM7224S, which is fully managed and will set you back more than £5,000.

The XS708E, on the other hand, is an L2 switch designed to provide SMBs with a simple, affordable solution for linking critical servers and storage to a 10GbE network over CAT-6 or CAT-7 cabling. The eight 10GBaseT ports are arranged in two groups at the front, the eighth of which is dual-personality and teams up with the fibre 10GbE SFP+ port next door.

The price is tempting, but there are a few compromises. Netgear describes the XS708E as “lightly managed”, which means it has only a basic set of features.

Since there’s no web browser interface, the XS708E can only be managed by Netgear’s Windows Configuration Utility. This discovers the switch on the network and provides a simple interface for configuration and monitoring duties.

The interface opens with a status screen showing all the ports’ connection speeds. You can view a basic table of throughput statistics, and selected ports can be grouped together in up to four high-speed trunks using link aggregation.

Netgear ProSafe Plus XS708E

SNMP isn’t supported, but port mirroring lets you send data from selected ports to another on the switch for network monitoring, possibly with a sniffer. The switch can conduct basic cable tests, and although it can’t tell you the cable length, it checks the selected port and advises if it spots a fault.

Quality-of-service (QoS) controls allow you to assign one of five priorities to each port. The switch supports 802.1p, since it can detect these packet fields and apply the appropriate prioritisation.

Traffic can also be controlled by applying rate limits to selected ports. Each can have one of eight ingress and egress values, from 32Mbits/sec to 4,096Mbits/sec.

Basic DoS protection is provided by broadcast storm controls, which can apply the same values as the rate limits to selected ports. There’s also 802.1Q and up to eight port-based VLANs on the menu.

We had no problems connecting the lab’s Dell servers and Qnap rack NAS appliance to the switch with our Emulex OCe11102-NT dual-port 10GBaseT cards. We also successfully tested over fibre with an Emulex 10GBase-SR SFP+ module in the eighth port. Annoyingly, the switch’s port status lights are so dim that it’s difficult to see them in bright light.

Power consumption has always been an issue with 10GbE switches, but the XS708E proved an exception. We found the switch itself consumed around 36W, and the load only went up by around 4W per 10GbE connection.

The XS708E is an appealing proposition, but bear in mind that it only represents one side of the cost equation – 10GbE adapters aren’t cheap, and our Emulex dual-port cards cost over £300 each. Even so, Netgear has no competition at this price point, and the XS708E remains an excellent choice for SMBs seeking a low-cost entry into 10GbE networking.