QNAP 12-Port Unmanaged 10GbE Switch Price: $469.99 Shipping Options:: $6 Standard Shipping Estimates: Ships in 3-5 Business Days. (Monday, Oct 15 to Thursday, Oct 18) + transit Condition: New
Well, I guess it’s not surprising. Who would have thought Mitsubishi not only made great VHS players and some of the best TV’s back in the day, they would be making some of the best construction equipment (excavators) on the planet. So, with Q Nap making some decent NAS boxes, guess they are “branching” out.
“Managed” is not always better, and not everyone needs a managed switch.
Management adds overhead, which will usually manifest in 1 of 2 ways,
Oversubscription. Meaning not all ports will run full wire speed simultaneously. You might get 6 of 12 ports before the switch starts “blocking.” This may or may not be a concern in your environment. If not, then go managed.
Cost. A non-blocking managed switch can easily cost 10x what the unmananged one does. If you need this, you know why.
That said, this switch is geared towards SAN (stoarge area networks). Usually you just want a simple, fast, non-blocking switch. HP ProCurves were famous for this. Why spend > $5,000 on a managed GB non-blocking Cisco switch for your SAN, when a $250 ProCurve gets the just done just as easily?
There are situations where an unmanaged switch satisfies all the business requirements, and usually saves plenty of money vs a managed version.
For instance, a fairly small NAS or SAN array may use a private switch (or set of switches) optimized for throughput but doesn’t need management or software isolation. It just needs physical wires to connect between devices on a private/dedicated network.
I almost always go for a managed switch instead as it covers far more use cases, but use the best tool for the job. Why pay $5k-$20k for a 10GbE managed switch when all you need is a dumb, high-throughput connections?
To the people asking why you’d need a 10 GbE unmanaged switch: sometimes you just need the speed and nothing else.
My house is wired for 10 GbE, but I can afford only 1 GbE NICs and switches right now.
At the right price, I’d certainly upgrade to 10 GbE without the management, because I literally don’t need that. That said, I need at least a 16 port switch, which this isn’t.
Given the QNAP name (a common NAS vendor), this was likely designed for small work groups that need high speed access to shared storage resources like this: