Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Difference between managed and unmanaged fiber optic media converter

If you finally figured out what fiber cable type you need for you application and your ready for media converters you might of pumped your brakes when you noticed the same converter being offered as "managed" or "unmanaged" and now your asking yourself, what's the difference?

A unmanaged media converter allows for simple communication with one another but does not provide monitoring, fault detection and setting up network configurations. The unmanaged option is a great choice for newbies and if you want a plug and play fiber network cable installation.



Managed media converters are more costly but do offer additional network monitoring, fault detection, remote configuration and more. After reviewing the managed Signamax media converters we stock, one thing I noticed was it mentions SNMP management. There is no mention of SNMP for our unmanaged fiber optic media converters. What the heck is SNMP?

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a standard for managing devices on IP networks. In common SNMP installations one or more administrative computers have the job of monitoring and managing a group of devices on a network. A software component called an agent will report information via SNMP to the manager.

A SNMP managed network consist of 3 key components.

* Managed device (Media Converter)
* Agent, software that runs on managed devices
* Network management systems (NSM) software that runs on the manager (Administrative computer)

So get the unmanaged if your a noob, get the mananged if your network has certain management demands.

"By Mercy Salinas"



     

No comments:

Post a Comment