Network switches in high-density environments: Managing traffic in busy networks

High-density environments, such as data centers, enterprise networks, and large campus infrastructures, often encounter challenges due to inefficient traffic management. These environments have too many devices, servers, endpoints, and data flows that need advanced networking solutions to operate smoothly. They also require adequate traffic management while maintaining low latency throughout the network.

As organizations increasingly use data to make decisions and rely on real-time communications, an effectively managed network becomes crucial. Such high-density environments, unfortunately, have their own unique networking challenges. Network switches help hold up these high-density networks and form the backbone of most large-scale enterprises. Before we explore the role of switches in these environments further, it's necessary to understand common problems that impact these networks.

High-density environments encounter unique challenges

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” is a popular phrase that fits well with high-density environments. If the following problems are not solved as quickly as they are identified, they can severely impact reliability and user experience across enterprise networks:

• Congestion and latency: In large work environments, thousands of devices compete for network resources at the same time. Without an effective network switch setup, it can create severe bandwidth congestion. This leads to higher latency, packet loss, and lower performance throughout your network. In industries, such as finance and analytics, network latency and congestion can directly affect revenue — even milliseconds of delay can cause losses worth thousands of dollars.
• Network congestion and performance degradation: As network traffic increases, certain segments of the network or individual devices may cause bottlenecks, slowing down the entire system. Delays, losses, and generally poor performance of applications running over the network may occur. Identifying these blockages requires careful monitoring and analysis of traffic patterns, device loads, and system capacity. Handling them often involves upgrading hardware, optimizing configurations, or redistributing traffic to ensure no single point becomes overwhelmed.
• Concerns with scalability: High-density environments must be able to grow and adapt to changing needs. This requires networking infrastructure that can scale horizontally and vertically without major disruptions or reconfigurations.
• Effective management: High-density networks are complex, and managing them requires effective planning, monitoring, and troubleshooting. This needs to be done across several connected devices and endpoints or it can lead to increased operational costs and security vulnerabilities, if managed improperly.

Advanced network switch features for high-density environments

Certain features found in network switches are necessary for enterprise networks to handle the previously mentioned challenges. These advanced capabilities can help enhance your network’s resilience and improve traffic management. Leading brands, like Cisco, integrate the following features into their switches to ensure they function as intended:

• High-port density: Switches made for high-density environments often offer many ports in a compact form factor. This allows for efficient use of rack space while supporting a large number of connections.
• Virtual and wireless LANs: VLANs and WLANs enable logical segmentation of the network, improving security and performance by isolating traffic between different departments or applications. It also reduces the number of switches required for your network.
• Link aggregation: Network administrators can use link aggregation to take a number of physical links and create a single logical link with much more bandwidth, providing redundancy.
• Programmability: Switches with support for SDN protocols, like OpenFlow, help build a more flexible and programmable network management protocol. Quality software makes dynamic traffic routing and policy enforcement easier for network administrators.

Upcoming innovations and trends in network technology

As high-density environments continue to evolve, four key trends are shaping the future of network switch technology:

• Increased network speeds: Highly advanced switches, like multi-gigabit switches, can give speeds of 2.5, 5, or 10 gigabits per second (GB/s) or more. These speeds are important for high-data transmission needed with new wireless standards, like Wi-Fi 6 or 6E.
• AI-powered network management: AI and machine learning (ML) will change network management systems soon. Most network management requires effective allocation of network resources, and AI tools will be adequate enough to make network congestion a problem of the past.
• Enhanced security features: Cyber security threats have compelled switch manufacturers to incorporate and leverage more advanced security capabilities, such as micro-segmentation and real-time threat detection.
• Green network deployment: To meet sustainability goals, enterprises want ways to build green networks. They are either relying on new energy-efficient designs and intelligent power management features or leveraging refurbished network hardware to extend the life cycle of their network equipment.

Building a high-density network with refurbished switches

The budget often clashes with the need for high-performance networking equipment in many IT departments — especially when building and maintaining high-density networks. Investing in new network switches for such environments can be expensive, making it challenging to acquire the necessary hardware within allocated budgets.

Refurbished switches from CXtec offer a practical solution to this problem. Our offering, equal2new®, provides high-quality refurbished enterprise network switches from leading brands. Our inventory features hardware leaders, like Cisco, Aruba, and Arista. We provide refurbished network switches capable of effectively supporting high-density environments.

These switches undergo rigorous testing and refurbishment processes to ensure they meet original manufacturer specifications. We also provide a lifetime warranty and advance replacement for network switches. Through our RapidCare® offering, enterprises can opt for aftermarket services.

Refurbished switches can significantly reduce costs without compromising on performance or reliability. They are repaired, rigorously tested, cleaned, and updated with the latest firmware. Supporting your network infrastructure with both new and refurbished network switches will help improve operational expenditure. It also extends the lifecycle of IT equipment and reduces the environmental impact of a business improving sustainability performance.