These switches are not for enterprises
November 05, 2020

These switches are not for enterprises

Umair Ali Khan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with D-Link Ethernet Switches

We have been using D-link Ethernet Switches for a long time now and we have both flavors of them, managed and unmanageable with Power Over Ethernet and without Power Over Ethernet as well. They are mainly being used at the access layer of our organization and users and other end devices are directly connected to them, then they are uplinked to the distribution and core layer.
  • Easy to use GUI
  • Inexpensive
  • Available in a different number of ports.
  • Support for copper as well as fiber ports.
  • Available in gigabit ethernet and above speeds as well.
  • Hangs under heavy traffic load.
  • Spanning-tree is disabled by default, which can cause loops.
  • D-link loop detection feature is disabled by default as well.
  • NTP is not available in smaller models.
  • It has low impact on budget.
  • It has caused loops in the network.
  • Sometimes the GUI hangs and switch becomes unavailable.
Cisco Catalyst Switches are top of the line when it comes to enterprise-grade network switches. They can handle large amounts of traffic with no impact on forwarding and they have all the features needed to manage and monitor in an enterprise environment. On the other hand, D-link Ethernet Switches lack some features and they do not perform well under heavy loads of traffic.
D-link Ethernet Switches are a valuable option for small to medium businesses. These businesses can fulfill their need to serve their user's network and save on the overall cost. However, when the organization grows beyond a certain number of users they will need to move to a better class of switches, which can give enterprise-grade performance.
We have never used D-Link support services for our ethernet switches. We only looked for new firmware from their website, which was available for most of the models that are being used in our environment. Other than that, the official blogs and community pages of D-Link support were very helpful for small issues related to different features like NTP, stp, etc.

Do you think D-Link Ethernet Switches delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with D-Link Ethernet Switches's feature set?

Yes

Did D-Link Ethernet Switches live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of D-Link Ethernet Switches go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy D-Link Ethernet Switches again?

No

D-link Ethernet Switches can be used in a small to medium-sized business environment where the number of users and the number of devices on the network is low. It is not appropriate for a high user density environment and similarly, it is not appropriate for a data center environment where the traffic load is very high and low latency is required between endpoints.

Using D-Link Ethernet Switches

ProsCons
Relatively simple
Quick to learn
Convenient
Familiar
Do not like to use
  • Easy to use GUI.
  • Plug and play in a small environment.
  • Gigabit ethernet support.
  • Loop detection
  • Centralized management
  • Changing management Vlan