MANAGED VS. UNMANAGED MEDIA CONVERTERS

by www.fiber-mart.com

UNMANAGED FIBER MEDIA CONVERTERS

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.

There are configurations you can set through a hardware DIP switch.

Managed fiber media converters

Managed media converters cost more but offer advanced network monitoring, fault detection, remote configuration, and more functions.

They have SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) agent running which reports their status to the NSM (Network Management System) manager.

A SNMP managed network consist of 3 key components:

• Managed device (the media converter)
• SNMP agent, software that runs on managed devices
• Network Management Systems (NSM) software that runs on the manager (administrative computer)

Most managed media converters support all authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) security services used in corporate networks, including TACACS+, RADIUS, LDAP, Kerberos, NIS and RSA.

To further protect ID’s and passwords from someone ‘snooping’ on the network, managed media converters provide secure management sessions by supporting SSH, SNMPv3, Telnet and HTTPS.

These types of features are used when managing your corporate firewalls, switches and routers.