HP ProCurve 2520 range brings widened feature base to small corporates

22 January 2010

Tarsus Technologies has announced the local availability of HP’s ProCurve 2520 range of layer two switches, capable of laying the perfect infrastructure foundation for small corporates that want to upgrade their networks to accommodate voice, video and wireless data traffic.

Pieter Engelbrecht, HP ProCurve product manager at Tarsus says the 2520 series is offered in four varietals, two eight-port and two 24-port models that offer a choice between Fast Ethernet (10/100) and Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000) performance.

“Both of the eight-port models come with two dual personality uplink ports to facilitate fiber uplink connectivity, while the 24-port Fast Ethernet model includes 4 Gigabit uplink ports, two of which can be used with either SFP transceivers or with standard copper cabling.

“The 24-port Gigabit version has four SFP slots that can be used in place of four of the copper ports,” he adds.

Engelbrecht says that a notable feature addition with the arrival of this switch family is support for PoE, making them perfect for simultaneously providing power and connectivity to VoIP handsets and wireless access points.

“The 2520 switch supports up to 15.4W on any given port, but has a limited power budget of 67W and 195W on the eight and 24-port models respectively. The power budget is, however, enough to power class two PoE devices simultaneously on all ports,” he explains.

From a management perspective, Engelbrecht says all four of the new switches can be fully managed via SNMP, a command-line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) and offer a Layer 2 feature set, something that brings a previously unavailable level of flexibility and control to SMB networks.

“Additionally, all four switches offer simple network security, and are capable of protecting SMB and small corporate networks against Denial-of-Service attacks,” he adds.

“The 2520 switch family is also designed for energy efficiency and quiet operation, making them adaptable enough to be used in both the datacentre environment and in open spaces. To support this, the eight-port models do not have fans and the 24-port models have variable speed fans to optimise power and noise levels,” he continues.

“Overall, we’re extremely bullish about the response that this new switch family will garner from the market, since it offers a wide range of features, superior manageability, security and flexibility at an unprecedented price point,” he says.

“Bundle this with HP’s limited lifetime warranty and SMBs truly have a winning solution for evolving their infrastructure to embrace convergence,” he concludes.