D-Link DE-1824i

D-Link DE-1824i ... These hubs are scalable and manageable to fully support expansion and complexity for departmental growth. Up to 8 hubs may be daisy-chained together, with 7 client hubs sharing an SNMP management agent of a master hub. The daisy-chain cable is the inexpensive twisted-pair cable and may be stretched up to 100 meters to permit users to place the hubs in the same stack in different rooms. The D-Link hubs can also be easily segmented anytime to prevent the network from being overloaded.

What makes the D-Link hubs different from other vendors' is their vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) that shows comprehensive system status and network traffic statistics. In appearance, the D-Link hubs look more like a sleek stereo/video set than a piece of network wiring equipment. In contrast to other hubs, which use LED lights to indicate a limited number of status and activities, the D-Link hubs are equipped with a large VFD screen that displays distinctively an extensive array of information, including bandwidth utilization, collision ratio, Runt occurrences, FCS packets and alignment errors.

To prevent performance degradation at peak traffic times, the administrator can separate the network into smaller, independent segments. This operation is made easy from a management station and involves a simple point and click of the mouse on a stack of hub front panels' bitmap on the screen. There is no need for the administrator to actually go to the equipment rack and disconnect the cables that daisy-chain the stack together. After segmenting off the network, all connected stations remain manageable through the same management agent residing in one master hub; there is no need to add any extra master hubs. When peak traffic traffic recedes, the administrator can re-connect the previously disconnected segments, again by pointing and clicking on the mouse.