In addition to expanding its 10 GB roster, ZyXel also indicated they are planning a major push into the Canadian SMB market in the near future.

Networking vendor ZyXEL Communications has broadened out its 10 GB SMB switch portfolio with two new offerings, the XS1920-12, a 12-port smart-managed 10-Gigabit switch, and the XS3700-24, a 24-port L2+ managed 10-Gigabit switch.

ZyXEL first introduced 10 GB managed switches into the entry level market in 2013, and the new switches continue to broaden the 10 GB products it offers SMBs

“ZyXEL will continue to expand breadth of the product line for SMBs,” said Steven Joe, executive vice president for channel business for Americas at ZyXEL. “10 GB is the required level there now because of video and social media and all the things being forced upon business, and the explosion of wireless itself with all the different devices everybody carries. This means for example, that all the wi-fi established in the past in hospitality industries will have to be improved. They will have to be upgraded because they can’t handle five devices in a room.”

Not all the SMB networking vendors are offering 10 GB, but that has effectively become table stakes, Joe said.

“This is the case both at SMB, and at some levels of the consumer market,” he said. “This is just demanded by the market today, for higher bandwidth, better wi-fi, better security. We know where the market is going and we are going to fill that, while those vendors who are more consumer players still aren’t on 10 GB. Consumer is there for us, but it’s not a leading area. SMB is first for us. The more enterprise technology that Cisco does, when it comes to bring it to the masses, that’s what we do.”

“The enterprise always has had 10 GbE for uplinking, but the biggest challenge for SMBs was that most don’t have the fiber cables so they would have to buy expensive transceivers,” said Tri Ngyuen, manager of business solutions for North American channels at ZyXEL. “The difference between that and now is that they can use RJ 45 Cat 5 and Cat6 cables – typical internet cables – which the average business is more used to using. This kind of switch used to cost tens of thousands, and now it’s much, much lower, and it can handle virtualization, BYOD and high bandwidth consumption.”

Both the XS1920-12 and XS3700-24 switches are backward-compatible, and offer port configuration for server and switch aggregation along with L2+ features and basic layer-3 routing. Both also have ZyXEL One Network (ZON) support, a configuration utility which checks locations, assigns IPs, reboots, and performs firmware upgrades on multiple switches, streamlining networking management from a single, easy-to-manage platform. ZON also auto-discovers other ZON enabled ZyXEL devices on the network, enabling simple configuration and management through the Web GUI.

The L2 switching capacity allows the XS1920-12 to be used as a core switch, and because it is backward-compatible with existing gigabit networks, it provides an easy, cost effective means of upgrading SMB networks. It has 10 x 10G Base-T ports for copper link, 2 x 10G SFP+ combo ports for fiber link, CPU protection, Loop Guard, IPMB, and dual image for network protection and reliability

The 24-port XS3700-24, with dual-stack capabilities for both IPv4 and IPv6, is designed to allow SMBs to transition to an enterprise-level network setup. It has 8 x 10G Base-T ports for copper link, 12 x 10G SFP+ ports for fiber link, 4 x 10G combo ports, TACAS+ and RADIUS authentication, Loop guard, and IPMB for network protection. It also has no single point of failure features in both hardware and software ensure zero downtime

Joe also indicated that ZyXEL is planning a major drive on the Canadian market

“We will have a big Canadian push, and it is something you will see soon,” he said. “I know Canada well from my days at D-Link, and Canada is the kind of place where we tend to make a launch first and then talk about it later – the reverse of the U.S. where you talk about something well before it is launched.”