The Asanté IntraCore 6524 is a full-featured midrange switch at an attractive price of $1,299. This 24-port 10/100 appliance has two GBIC interfaces built into the front panel. Like the SMC TigerSwitch 6948L2, the IntraCore offers VLAN tagging; GVRP, which dynamically adds VLANs to port egress lists across a domain; and IGMP snooping. These features make the 6524 well suited for handling multimedia traffic, including VoIP and video, even in a mixed computing environment.

Besides using the switch's rudimentary command line interface, you can either telnet into the switch or use its intuitive built-in HTTP server. If security is a big concern for your network environment, you will appreciate the 6524's ability to track MAC and IP for multiple devices per port. You can also block and filter MAC addresses that you add into the security portion of the switch's interface. Aside from the location of the serial interface at the back, we liked the space-saving 1U design and complete feature set. The 6524 also integrated well with the rest of Asanté's line of IntraCore products.