Resilient and Redundant Design for Round-The-Clock Business Continuity
The network is a critical part of daily business operations as such any type of network failure can have a massive cost to the business. The ZyXEL MS-7206 has been developed to offer enterprise a resilient and redundant design to ensure the continuity of enterprise network operations. In terms of hardware architecture, the MS-7206 has two slots for managed switch fabrics; the dual active/active resilient architecture enables two MM-7201 management cards to work together to load balance and share the network traffic processing. Implementing the two management cards also provides the business with resilience in the shape of fast failover in the event of failure.
In addition with dual redundant power supplies and removable fan modules, the MS-7206 provides extremely high redundancy for non-stop operations. In terms of firmware architecture, the MS-7206 supports IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation to reduce network downtown by providing redundant paths and bandwidth aggregation to critical connections. With IEEE 802.1w Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP), Open Shortest Past First (OSPF) routing and Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP), enterprise networks will be capable of recovering immediately from failed links.
Intelligent QoS for Mission-Critical Enterprise Applications
As more applications are integrated into IP-based networks the network traffic flows are now more complicated and diverse than ever. To ensure the quality of multiple services on a converged network, adopting an advanced traffic control technology to manage different types of traffic flow is critical and necessary to enterprise networks. The MS-7206 delivers industry leading throughput by enabling local switching decisions to be made on the switch interface I/O as opposed to forwarding unnecessary traffic to the management fabric.
The ZyXEL MS-7206 Switch supports Intelligent QoS features to organise network traffic into the best condition for mission-critical applications. With support for Class of Service (CoS) and Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP), administrators can easily classify and perform traffic prioritisation for critical applications such as VoIP and video conferencing. For traffic prioritisation and bandwidth control, the MS-7206 provides a complete set of QoS features such as multi-layer (L2/L3/L4) ACL prioritisation, eight priority queues, SPQ/WRR/WFQ scheduling algorithms and bandwidth control with granularity of 64 kbps. Thanks to these excellent features, network administrators can easily set correct priority and adjust the best bandwidth to guarantee the quality of all network services according to different characteristics of business operations.
Completely Safe Enterprise Networks
In the knowledge economy, information security has become a critical issue. Undoubtedly, enterprise networks are the most important platform to acquire and exchange information. In addition to setting a firewall to prevent the threats incoming from the Wide Area Network (WAN), a well secured Local Area Network (LAN) is also important for enterprises to protect intellectual property within the internal network.
ZyXEL MS-7206 Switch provides a complete set of security features to protect important data, administer traffic and secure enterprise networks. Through the multilayer (L2/L3/L4) ACL security filtering, network administrators can easily monitor and secure enterprise networks with transparent sources and destination information like MAC addresses, IP addresses, Ethernet type and TCP/UDP. With 802.1x authentication and port security, administrator can deny unauthorised users from accessing the network. The intrusion lock function detects the “plugged” and “unplugged” status change of Ethernet cables, and the switch can deactivate the port automatically if needed. Though all these choreographed security features, the MS-7206 Switch gives customers a completely safe enterprise network environment.
Reducing Operation Costs with Enterprise-Class Trouble-Free Network Management
To manage and maintain a complicated enterprise network is a tough job for network administrators, therefore employing friendlier network management interfaces with more options can relieve the difficulty and take more advantage of the enterprise networks. The MS-7206 supports comprehensive network management features like ZyXEL’s exclusive iStacking™ technology that allows administrators to manage a switch cluster (of up to 24 ZyXEL switches) through a single master ZyXEL Switch.
In addition, various network management options are available on the MS-7206: Web, Telnet and the console port are all supported, so network administrators can choose to manage the switch using the friendly Web-based configuration or the convenient text-based CLI (Command Line Interface). Furthermore, the MS-7206 also supports centralized SNMP management software for the switch maintenance tasks to be done remotely. This helps reducing the operation costs and greatly increasing efficiency. For more security, SSHv1/v2 and SSL can be introduced to encrypt management sessions.
more difficult for IT executives to choose between high performance and high 
power consumption. To address this, the 
energy efficiency. According to tests conducted by The Tolly Group, the