You may be a five person micro business, or a 500 person business at the upper limit of the SMB space.

Whatever your size, the computers that you use transfer data back and forth through a network device called a switch – yes, these little devices;

You will usually find them hiding in a server room or closet, but some smaller businesses have them sitting on a table or mounted on a wall.

Techies will correctly argue that the term switch covers a multitude of devices, but for the purpose of this post, we are just going to deal with what are generally called layer 2 switches similar to the above image that most business in the small to medium entrprise use to link computers or internal network links.

Unmanaged vs. Managed

The point of todays post?

You won’t see a difference just looking at them, but for your internal IT staff or external service providers, there is a huge difference on the inside in managed versus unmanaged devices.

Unmanaged devices are generally a little less expensive than their smarter managed brethren, for these unmanaged devices, you just plug in the power cord – then plug in each cable from computers or servers and all is complete. The downside is that what happens inside the guts of the device is invisible to you.

The other option, are the smarter brethren called  managed devices. These devices have some intelligence and management features built in allowing additional control of the device to view, or modify the configuration, show network traffic status, troubleshoot issues etc.

Here is where the difference really shows itself.

If your business is like mine, you have experienced questions or complaints such as; ‘Why is the Internet slow?” or  ”why is this taking so long..?”

As a SME business executive, Yes – you have probably asked these types of questions yourself! (you can admit it!)

With these intelligent managed devices, the visibility into the device to troubleshoot these types of issues pays dividends. The image below is a screenshot that shows a few of the capabilities and some of the information available in a managed device that you cannot get from an unmanaged one.

(Click here for full sized image)

Here are two small business examples I have experienced.

In one case where people were complaining about our ‘Internet being slow’ checking the devices allowed me to see which physical computer was causing the problem. I could do this by seeing the amount of data being transferred by each computer, the computer with its data transfer rate spinning like a top was the guilty party. (The individual had decided to download the latest, coolest Adobe graphics software program that was approximately the size of two full length DVD films)

In a second instance, an extended power failure caused one of the switch ports to fail to synchronize its speed properly, fixing that synchronization issue  (duplex for techies) significantly improves performance.

 The SMB Takeaway

The first time that your IT team or service provider can resolve a service issue by looking into the guts of these devices, you will have earned a return on the  extra dollars you paid for these intelligent devices versus their brainless brethren.

Disclaimer: The images in this post are particular vendors, all major vendors supply both managed and unmanaged devices, and this post is not marketing or endorsing any one particular brand or model of device.