FEATURE OF CORE SWITCHES

Due to all traffic in a system is transmitted to the core switch, it is required to have high reliability, high efficiency, manageability, and low latency. Generally, it adopts the managed switches in the core layer.

The core layer is an integral part in networking, but it is not requested in  all networking deployment, especially in the small scale of network, such as networking with computer number below 50 sets, while the replacement of the core switch could be an 8 port switch.

FEATURE OF AGGREGATION SWITCHES

As the aggregation point of access switches, the aggregation switch is required with the ability to process the access layer information and submits it to the upstream chain of the core layer. And it needs the function of network isolation and segmentation as well. Therefore, it usually adopts the VLAN layer 3 managed switches.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CORE SWITCHES AND AGGREGATION SWITCHES

Before get to know the differences between the aggregation switches and core switches, you should know the definition of the aggregation layer and core layer.

- Aggregation Layer

The performance of switch in aggregation layer is higher than the requirement of access switch, and clients can choose the L2 switches with thousands of upload port as the aggregation switch.

Eg: The 10/100M port of aggregation switch is connected to the access switch and gigabit port is connected to core switch. And the number of cameras on aggregation switch should be controlled at about 30. The 720P network camera with 4M as example, there are 6 pcs of 720P network camera in each switch in access layer, and the aggregation switch is connected with 5 pcs of above access switch. The total bandwidth of the aggregation layer switch is 4M * 6 * 5 = 120M, therefore the aggregation switch should be connected with core switch through gigabit port.

- Core Layer

Core switch is the important part of the digital monitoring system, it is the connect bridge of aggregation switch,monitoring platform and storage server etc. It is suggested to choose L3 full gigabit core switches. If the quantity of connected camera is more than 150 units, a L3 10G core switch is recommended.

The biggest difference between core switch and aggregation switches is that, core switch is required to always be fast, highly available and fault tolerant since it connects all the aggregation switches. Therefore, a core switch should be a fully-managed switch.

Another difference is that there’s generally only one (or two for redundancy) core switch used in a small/midsize network, but the aggregation layer and the access layer might have multiple switches.