Nortel Networks’ 4548GT-PWR switch has 48 10/100/1000BaseTX RJ-45 connections with Power over Ethernet (PoE) and four shared small form factor gigabit ports.

In IT Week tests, initial setup entailed connecting an RS-232 cable to our Windows 2000 Professional system, firing up the onboard hyperterminal program and then providing network parameters to Nortel’s 4548GT-PWR setup utility. We could set the device and gateway IP addresses, as well as community strings for Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). We put the 4548GT-PWR on a 192.168.1.0 subnet and connected three AirTight Network sensors with Category 5 cables, which supplied power through the Gigabit Ethernet ports. We also connected one of AirTight’s SpectraGuard Enterprise appliances.

We could manage the 4548GT-PWR using either the command line interface, a web graphical user interface (GUI), or by installing Nortel’s Java Device Manager (JDM). The JDM has a versatile GUI that can display a real-time graphical representation of the front panel of the 4548GT-PWR switch. This meant that although we could see throughput trends by accessing the AirTight web GUI, we could also graph throughputs using Nortel’s JDM.

Nortel’s JDM can be installed on Windows 2000 or XP Professional systems, or on systems running Sun’s Solaris, Linux or HP-UX.

The 4548GT-PWR can generate 320W, delivering a maximum of 6.6W per port when all 48 ports are active. This can be increased to 15.4W per port through the addition of an optional 420W external power unit. We could control power to specific ports in 1W increments from a minimum of 3W to a maximum of 15.4W.

The system also allowed us to guarantee power to designated high-priority ports, and reduce power to low-priority ports. Another optional extra is Nortel’s Ethernet RPS 15 backup device, which can inject 320W into the 4548GT-PWR in the event of a mains failure.

The 4548GT-PWR is part of Nortel’s ERS 4500 Series switch family. Like its siblings, the 4548GT-PWR has a rear-mounted cascade port operating at 40Gbit/s bi-directionally, which allows firms to stack up to eight units giving 384 gigabit ports. There are extra gigabit uplinks through small form factor pluggable optical transceivers. All small form factors are supported except for the XFP 10Gbit/s version.

Standards support is comprehensive, with 802.1d, 802.1p prioritisation, 802.1x port access control, and 802.1w catered for, but the 4548GT-PWR’s routing protocol support is limited to the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP).