If our company was going to buy a new office and deploy a bunch of stuff, it would be one of these switches that I would purchase, especially because you're able to stack different models and types, then manage it nice and easily. I could see, as a network administrator, the ability to look at your entire network from one page and have the ability to diagnose and fix problems in one area. That would be fantastic.

It has saved a lot of time. I haven't tried exporting out the configuration and then importing it into another one, so traditional switches might give you a little bit more that way because you can export out the configs (You can now export out configurations). The web management through one pane of glass for all of my NETGEAR switches has made it a lot easier. It makes it easy to compare settings from other sites when you're trying to duplicate what you've done in the past. You can look at it real quick - without having to remote all the way into a machine, and then try and get into the switch, and remember the IP address of the switch and the credentials of the switch. It's all right there for you. I have a single login for all of my switches.

The cloud management has been huge for us. We have 80 clients and they all have switches. We've been migrating them over as much as we can, when it's called for, to the cloud-managed Insight ones. On those sites, we know more information without having to do complicated SNMP traps. We get nice emails, we get a web interface, and we're not having to wait for our RMM tools to get SNMP traffic to notify us. We don't have to do complicated configurations. It's all just part of the simple setup, of joining the switch to an account.

It has improved my organization because now the entire network is quicker. A lot of users tell me that things seem faster but they can't really elaborate. My guess is everything is just a fraction of a second quicker going through the network and that adds up at the end of the day.

We work with a large variety of project sizes. This solution has come in to help our company in the mid-project size range, where you have a customer who needs two or three switches but doesn't have the budget for an enterprise grade switch that is $10,000 to $20,000. The NETGEAR product line fits great in that medium project size where you need to have some of those enterprise capabilities, or a switch with a bit more power behind it, but you don't necessarily have a huge budget. At the same time, it can also scale up to those large projects. 

A few of our projects have used NETGEAR switches as a core for video walls where we do a lot of Crestron NVX, which is a multicast video transport. They have used the NETGEAR switch as a core to pass that traffic over to a video wall with multiple streams. In most of our projects, we'll do one to two switches. The flexibility with the M4300 is they have anything from a smaller 12 to 24 port switch up to a chassis based 96 port switch. In our large projects, we typically go for the chassis based switch, which has up to 96 ports. That covers everything we need. Normally, there are one to two switches in different projects.

We're using 10 Gigabit switching in a limited respect for interswitch communication. That is our primary use case for 10 Gigabit or larger connectivity where essentially we have multiple switches connected to each other and need to pass multicast video or audio from one switch to another. We do have a few products out there that are using that for multicast video transport. From a switch perspective, it's been very positive and stable. Some of the other products have had issues, but that's not related to NETGEAR. They are passing on the high bandwidth traffic without any issues.

We're seeing a 35 to 40 percent cost drop and, so far, we don't have any returns or any RMAs. No flaws.

We recently had a problem with a client, a restaurant in the city. We had installed the Insight management solution for the switches and the access points, and another solution for the router. On Sunday, a day we don't normally work, we got a call from the client that there was a problem with one of the access points and one of the switches, regarding their table-booking solution. Through the Insight app, I was able to quickly look at possible problems at the client's location. We determined that the switch that the table-booking system was connected to was down. It was offline. I told the boss of the restaurant to have look at a particular cabinet because there is one switch that's stored away beneath the point-of-sale system and the booking system. There was an adapter that was not inserted in the power plug.

It was pretty easy to determine the problem at the client's, without going to the client and having a look at it myself. It was solved in five minutes and that's something we couldn't do in the past without Insight.

We have been able to standardize on a few of the major vendors. This has increased our efficiencies. We have been able to provide configurations on switches that we recommend. It's an easier configuration or setup process for our guys out in the field who are installing this stuff. Thus, we have been able to standardize on a grouping of switches, which helps speed up the process with our testing, quality control, and installation out in the field.

Netgear is the only switch manufacturer with a marketing push into the AV marketplace. They are the only major manufacturer out there who is testing and looking at what the AV requirements are as far as streaming capabilities, high bandwidth, and some of the stuff with new AV technology. They are designing switches to better support this.

It is very easy to use. They give you the ability within the screens to make changes and you can push them down to all the devices at once. It's saving us a lot of time in terms of making changes on our customers' equipment by making changes at the organizational level and just pushing a button to push them down to the equipment.

Using the Insight product line and the Insight Pro interface has reduced the amount of time that my organization needs to spend on two things:

1. Setting up the equipment. By having it all configured in the system and being able to push down the configurations to all the devices at once, we've saved at least 50 percent of the time we would spend setting up new equipment for our customers. 
2. The other piece where we've saved a huge amount of time is in maintenance. For the networking equipment we used previous to Insight, you would have to log on to the equipment and push up the firmwares that had the security fixes in them, and do it manually. By using the Insight product line, we can schedule the firmware updates for all the equipment at the same time or at different times, but we can have it all automated and that's easily saving us six to ten hours of labor per customer per quarter.

That the switches can save a configuration or even import a configuration via CLI is largely beneficial. It's similar to our current workflow with Cisco switches, so it doesn't require much of a curve as far as implementing those features or implementing a configuration that way. It is straightforward.

The ability to use the web interfaces is a big plus. For implementation, our company can quickly update firmware and not having to worry about licensing, which is a big deal. That's a big difference from some of the Cisco products as well as the Extreme products that for specific features require licensing. Not having that with the NETGEAR product is great. This aids us tremendously, as a company, to roll out these switches on multiple projects.

In terms of use and deployment, it's really easy because we have the customer set up already, so the configuration gets downloaded right away. Once you have your first customer set up, any switch that you buy for them, going forward, the setup time for that up gets cut down dramatically. Technically, we don't have the set up the switches at our office. We could just send them directly to Kansas. But we always like to double-check. It does go through a few rounds of firmware and we want to make sure that it always gets to the correct one. Sometimes customers don't realize how many times it needs to update.

What we've found is that if you give your customer access to their admin portal, even though, as a managed service provider, they're paying us to manage their equipment, the insight it gives them means they can actually see what they're paying for now. It's really user-friendly. It's very visual, so you can see what ports are being used. Visually, it's much easier for a customer to understand what they're paying for, which helps us, as a managed service provider, retain those customers. That's what we really like about it.

Another way it's helped is, let's say a network is down. Instead of my trying to talk with an end customer to get them to troubleshoot - and that's going very slowly, because they're trying to do their own job - what happens instead is that I can do it remotely and get it done maybe within an hour or so. 

Instead of

1. working with an end user for a couple of hours, and 
2. when that doesn't work, sending someone for a minimum eight-hour drive to the closest one in Kansas and as much as a 14-hour drive to the farthest - that would be almost two days where I lose a tech just driving. Then another day for them to fix the issue themselves and then the time to drive back. So, if it's the furthest location, I could lose a full week of an employee's time, instead of an hour or two troubleshooting within the portal.

Finally, the cost of the hardware and additional services is low and it helps our business because that's exactly what our customers are looking for. We can finally upgrade their old equipment and they can get something newer with all of the features that we wanted to give them and it's actually in their price range. Before, they weren't willing to upgrade their equipment because, if they want it cloud-managed, the solution was too expensive. This has helped our business to provide better service to our customers, and that's what they look for from us.

With the NETGEAR 4300 series switches, we have been able to test, demonstrate, and provide training on the ZeeVee 10GbE SDVoE gear, which we distribute.

Thanks to the availability of 10GbE, we have been able to show the difference between compressed 4K video streaming over 1GbE and uncompressed 4K video streaming with the use of the SDVoE protocol and 10GbE.

However, 10GbE is Ethernet in another speed. We had to learn how to handle it. This knowledge will be useful in future projects. For example, one of our upcoming projects will have 24 encoders and 11 decoders with two M4300-96X NETGEAR switches.

We upgraded from a previous, 1GB-only solution so it should be a lot faster but I don't have any benchmarks on it. In the past, there were some complaints from employees that the network was slow but I haven't had any more complaints about it. That's a metric, of sorts.

At this particular facility, what they had was a Cisco router coming in, and then a gigabit switch. That switch went out to these 10 x 100 fiber optic switches, which were outdated. That bottlenecked the whole network at the network room, and then it went out to a media converter, and then to a gigabit switch, and then it went out to the clients' routers inside their homes. It was a pretty complex network.

The idea was to find the right product so I could eliminate all of those extra pieces and devices and the troubleshooting that went with them, and pare it down to only two pieces of equipment. The right equipment was the NETGEAR M4300-96X. It allowed me to be able to troubleshoot much quicker. It allowed the operations to be very seamless.

As far as remoting into it goes, it is very efficient because I can do it from anywhere, through the remote software. I can get right into it, I can change settings really quickly, if a customer needs to add another device into it or if I need to make changes on the VLANs which we created.

Another great function of this particular switch is that we have roughly 100-plus VLANs running through it and it's never had an issue. No hiccups, nothing. It just works like a well-oiled machine. It has saved us a lot of time and money and it allows our customers to be more efficient and save money too.

The improvement is that, if there's an issue, I don't have to go onsite to look into it. It saves time, which translates to money. If I'm on the road for any significant time, my clients are going to get trip charges. My being able to remotely manage it means they can save those costs, and it could be back up more quickly because it might be something minor that I can remotely resolve.

The out-of-the-box IGMP functionality has improved our organization because it is such a time-saver for our technicians. It means they don't have to worry about the extra setup that most other manufacturers require on their switches. They're able to just power them on and to plug in and start configuring the AV devices, rather than worrying about configuring the network. Organizationally, that saves us a lot of time on how we deliver projects.

For us, the Insight platform is a consistent experience from one office to the next. A user can connect to one access point in one office and then automatically connect to another access point in the office, without having to do any WiFi connections or passwords. So the user experience is seamless.

And that also saves time. It's only a few minutes per user for each office we go to, but it soon adds up and reduces frustration.

I put together a mesh configuration of GS108E and GS110TP switches for several customers to allow them to setup a full High-Availability (HA) configuration between two different ISP devices (modems/routers with only a single customer link each) so there was complete failover between each firewall and each ISP device.

The devices are easy to deploy, easy to configure, and easy to upgrade, especially with their Smart Control Center (SCC) software.

We're an MSP. Let's say we do an entire network retrofit with a customer. We're talking about increasing bandwidth backbones ten to 20-fold, from one gigabit to 20 gigabits, utilizing the virtual stacking with the switches. It allows our workflow, managing their systems, to be quick and easy. We can do it remotely very well and we can do a lot of very granular programming changes without having to be onsite.

It's hard to give you metrics because what we do is rebuild entire networks, and most of them are old and dilapidated. They may have been okay in their day, but we're talking 10-year-old networks a lot of times. What we're doing is increasing their bandwidth, increasing security, and increasing the flow of traffic and data, depending on type, etc.

They are reasonably priced and have worked pretty well for us.

We're able to pre-configure a device, before it gets deployed, in the cloud. We don't even have to open up the box, we can just preconfigure it in the cloud. As soon as we deploy it onsite, it automatically gets configured.