Launched in May and costing £1,100 + VAT, Allied Telesis’s AT-8000S/48POE is a 48-port, 10/100Mbit/s, Layer 2, managed, stackable, Power over Ethernet (PoE) switch.

The AT-8000S has two integrated gigabit links for stacking further AT-8000S units into a ring topology using standard untwisted pair (UTP) cabling. There are also two Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP) 10/100/1000 uplink ports and two standby gigabit uplinks to connect to other switching hardware.

The AT-8000S switch is aimed at branch offices and the wiring closets of larger firms needing to support powered devices such as IP phones, wireless access points or remote video monitoring devices.

The AT-8000S can support 256 virtual LANs (VLANs), has an 8,000 MAC address memory space and can support quality of service (QoS) based on 802.1p. It can prioritise traffic using 802.1p, Type of Service (ToS) and Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) with four transmission queues. Six AT-8000S units can be stacked, and port mirroring, trunking and VLANs can be run across stacked systems.

We found the switch was easy to set up and once we had given it an IP address and pointed it towards domain name servers and the IP gateway, we could log in outside our labs using LogMeIn and control the device remotely.

Power for devices comes from PowerDsine’s PoE chipset, offering total available power of 375W for use through the 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports. This means 48 class two devices can be used drawing half power or 24 class three devices can be supported using full power.

Not all ports can have full power, so the device allows a priority to be set on each port. We could set high, medium or low priorities. When connecting a device requiring power through Category 5 cabling, the graphical interface automatically identifies the class of device, the output voltage, current and power, and the power limit. Plugging in our 3Com WLAN AP7250 access point showed the port delivering 6.6W and 130mA but an indicated 506V rather than 50.6V was clearly a bug.

The AT-8000S boasts one of the better graphical web interfaces. A minor criticism was that we could not define a group of ports and then change parameters for the group as if for a single port. Allied Telesis said this shortcoming will be addressed soon with a firmware upgrade.

There is full support for Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) versions 1, 2, and 3. For users we set up switch access with a local password, but we could have easily used Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (Radius) or Terminal Access Controller Access Control System (Tacacs+). Switch users may be given full configuration rights or monitoring-only rights.

Onboard system utilities include a cable tester, which reveals the distance to any cable breaks. There is also a troubleshooter for the SFP optical transceivers, to show temperature, output power, input power and faults.