The FastIron II and NetIron also support port-mirroring. While Extreme's products support filtering on data output, the Foundry products let you select data in, data out or both, but no filters on the monitor port. Like Extreme, Foundry supports Web-based management. Most features of the switch can be configured from the Web-based management, though we found the command-line interface easier to use. Foundry also ships a standalone application that can be used to configure the switch from any Windows NT workstation. This software is more of an element manager than an enterprise management program. It will let you manage multiple switches, but does not provide a logical map--instead, it offers a pull-down list of available switches on your network.

Extreme Networks Summit24 and Summit48
Extreme Networks submitted its Summit24 and Summit48 workgroup Layer 3 switches. The Summit24 is a 24-port 10/100 Fast Ethernet switch with a single Gigabit Ethernet uplink. The Summit48 is the Summit24's bigger brother, featuring 48 10/100 ports and two gigabit uplinks. The Summit24 has one additional physical-layer redundant gigabit uplink; the Summit48 has two. Many of the features located on the Foundry router were still in beta on the Extreme switch, giving Foundry a slight edge in features. Likewise, Foundry's price per port was slightly better than Extreme's when compared with two gigabit uplinks.

The Extreme Summit24 and Summit48 list for $9,495 and $11,995, respectively, and include the GBIC Gigabit Ethernet media adapters necessary to connect them to your network, as well as the Layer 3 routing code feature. The switches are also sold without Layer 3 code for about $4,000 less. With Layer 3 routing enabled, the Extreme offerings list for $380 a port and $240 a port, respectively.

The Extreme switches were designed as switches first and routers second. Out of the box, the Summit24 and Summit48 come configured as a single, flat switching domain. An administrator can configure routing interfaces as he or she sees fit, grouping ports into logical router interfaces, or assigning each port to its own IP subnet. Multinetting (supporting more than one subnet on a single interface) is supported on Summit switches, but must first be enabled on a global level before configuring interfaces for multiple IP subnets.

Extreme's switches have four distinct hardware queues that are used to provide QoS on the network. Extreme's QoS features differ significantly from Foundry's. For starters, QoS is a function of minimum and maximum bandwidth on Extreme's switches, while Foundry's is relative only to other traffic crossing the switch. Extreme's offerings let you create up to 32 QoS profiles. Each profile can specify a minimum amount of bandwidth to be guaranteed to an application, and a maximum amount that the application is allowed to consume. This traffic can also be classified as normal, medium, medium-high or high priority. QoS profiles can be set based on the port that the traffic enters on, the VLAN that the traffic enters from, the destination IP address of the host, or the MAC destination address specified in the packet. We tested all four types of QoS classifications, and found that they all functioned as expected, and at wire speed.

During our tests, we took advantage of Extreme's port-mirroring function to determine whether tagged packets were indeed being sent by the 3Com NICs. Once you have established a mirroring port on the Extreme switches, up to eight mirroring filters can be added. These allow you to mirror traffic based on port, VLAN or MAC address. All traffic destined to or from the selected port, VLAN or MAC address is copied to the port for each filter, which makes troubleshooting a breeze.

The Summit48 and Summit24 have limited filtering capabilities. The switch can "blackhole"--discard--traffic based on destination MAC address or destination IP address.

Extreme's Web-based management lets you configure many aspects of the switch, including VLANs, IP routing, RIP (Routing Information Protocol), OSPF and multicast features.