Dell Networking N1524 Managed Switch

The Dell Networking N1524 is a 1U campus access switch with 24 RJ45 10/100/1000Mb auto-sensing ports and four front 10GbE SFP+ ports, two of which can be reassigned as stacking ports. It moves 128Gbps of switch fabric at a 128Mpps forwarding rate, runs Dell EMC Networking OS6, and stacks up to four units under a single management address.

Where this switch belongs

This is wiring-closet hardware. Dell positioned the N-series at the IDF and MDF layer of a campus network - the switch that user ports, access points, phones and cameras plug into, uplinked over fibre or twinax to an aggregation layer. It is not a top-of-rack data centre switch and it is not trying to be: there are no 25G or 40G ports, the buffer is sized for access traffic rather than incast, and the whole design is built around port density per rack unit and low power draw rather than raw throughput.

Within that role it is a strong fit for offices, schools, clinics, warehouses and any site where the requirement is a few hundred gigabit access ports that are cheap to run and simple to manage. Where powered devices are needed, the PoE+ variant of this model covers them without changing anything else about the design.

Uplinks, stacking and the trade-off between them

Four front 10GbE SFP+ ports give 40Gbps of uplink against 24Gbps of access capacity, a 0.6:1 ratio. Standalone, that means the uplink capacity actually exceeds the access capacity - there is no oversubscription at all.

There is a catch worth understanding before you design around it. The N1500 has no dedicated stacking ports. To build a stack it reassigns two of those four SFP+ cages as stacking ports, which is where the 40Gbps full-duplex stacking figure comes from. A stacked N1500 therefore has two SFP+ ports left for uplinks, not four, and the ratio moves to 1.2:1. Standalone, all four are yours. This single fact is the clearest reason to choose between the N1500 and the N2000: the N2024 keeps both of its uplinks in any stack size because its stacking ports are separate and at the rear.

The SFP+ ports take 10GbE SR, LR or ER optics, 1G SFP optics for a gigabit uplink, or SFP+ twinax direct attach cable. Note that stacking on this family uses ordinary SFP+ twinax between the reassigned ports - it does not use the dedicated stacking cable that the N2000 and N3000 use, because there is no port for one to plug into.

Routing: Layer 3 Lite, and what that excludes

The N1500 is a Layer 3 Lite platform. It routes IPv4 and IPv6 at line rate on every port, non-blocking, with 256 static IPv4 routes, 128 static IPv6 routes and 128 routing interfaces - but the only dynamic routing protocol it speaks is RIP. There is no OSPF on this family.

That distinction is worth stating plainly because the marketplace routinely describes these switches as either 'Layer 2' or 'Layer 3' and neither label is right. They are not Layer 2 switches - inter-VLAN routing works, and it works at line rate. They are also not full Layer 3 switches in the sense a network engineer would mean it, because you cannot bring one into an OSPF area. For a closet that routes between a handful of local VLANs and points a default route at the core, Layer 3 Lite is exactly enough. For a routed-access design, it is not, and the N2024 is the model that adds OSPFv2.

The switch supports 512 VLANs and 16K MAC addresses. That is sized for an access closet rather than an aggregation point, and is the other place the N1500 shows its position below the N2000.

Power, cooling and cord type

Power draw is modest: 30.2W maximum with a maximum thermal output of 103.1 BTU/hr, from an integrated 40W 80PLUS-certified supply. Energy-Efficient Ethernet is settable per port and the switch uses lower-power PHYs and short-cable detection to cut draw on idle links, which adds up across a building.

The supply is integrated and not removable, so there is no second internal PSU to add. If the closet needs power redundancy, the optional external unit is the only route to it. This model uses a standard C13 cord.

Management and day-two operations

The switch runs Dell EMC Networking OS6, the shared N-series operating system, with dual firmware images held on-board so an upgrade can be rolled back without a console visit. Management is available through the CLI over console, Telnet or SSHv2, through the embedded web GUI, and through SNMP v1/v2c/v3 including Dell OpenManage Network Manager. USB auto-configuration is the feature most worth knowing about for multi-site rollouts: the switch will pull its configuration from a USB flash drive at boot, so a closet can be commissioned by someone who has never touched a switch CLI.

Access control is handled by authentication tiering, which lets you order 802.1X, MAC Authentication Bypass and Captive Portal on a single port so that a laptop, a printer and a guest device can all land on the same physical port and be treated differently. AAA authorization with TACACS+ accounting and RADIUS is supported, along with Private VLAN extensions and Private VLAN Edge for tenant separation, and RSPAN for monitoring a port from somewhere else in the Layer 2 domain without a dedicated tap.

Choosing between this and its siblings

• N1524P - identical switching, with PoE+ on every port. Choose it if access points, phones or cameras are going on this switch.
• N1548 - the 48-port version of the same switch. Port count is the only meaningful difference within a family apart from the fabric and forwarding figures that scale with it.
• N2024 - the N2000 equivalent. Adds OSPFv2, 4,094 VLANs, a 32K MAC table, MLAG and a twelve-unit stack over dedicated rear ports, at the cost of two SFP+ ports instead of four.

A secondary-market-only platform

Dell has retired the N-series from its own catalogue. The N1100, N2200 and N3200 series pages on Dell's store now redirect to the Dell homepage, and no N1500 or N2000 model appears in Dell's current switching line-up at all. That has a practical consequence for anyone standardising on this platform: there is no new-unit channel to buy from, so refurbished hardware is not the budget alternative here, it is the only supply. It also means spares planning matters more than it would on a current platform. Buying a cold spare alongside the production units is the normal approach, and it is worth doing while the model is still plentiful.

Every unit we ship is tested and supplied with warranty. Configuration, cabling and optics are all commodity items on this generation, which is part of why the platform remains a sensible campus choice rather than a compromise.