Value -
Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item.
At under $1,000 for a brand new model the NETGEAR XS708E is a solid buy. There are some things that should be improved on and added in, but for the most part you are getting a solid piece of hardware for a low price. Sadly you will need to pick up 10GBaseT cards (with RJ-45 ports) and Cat6 (or 6e) cables before you can take advantage of what the XS708E has to offer. This makes the overall cost of ownership a little higher, but if you are looking to build a solid backbone for a network then this price is not that drastic.

Conclusion -
As the enterprise pushes down into the medium and small business sector we are going to see an increased need for internal bandwidth. More and more companies are leveraging shared storage and virtualization both of which require bandwidth to work to their best potential. The NETGEAR XS708E brings more than enough bandwidth both small and medium sized businesses without breaking a sweat. There are some issues with the XS708E that you need to be aware of and that NETGEAR should correct soon. The biggest of these is that the configuration utility only works in Windows. You cannot configure the XS708E by any other means. This is a little unusual and something that will put many network engineers off of the product. The XS708E also has some confusing and counterintuitive setup screens. You can easily get mixed up configuring or changing VLans due to the way NETGEAR chose to design the screens for that. The utility will not work if you are not on the same subnet as the switch either. It cannot read across VPNs or VLans and there is no way to manually tell it what IP you want to use. This fault makes it hard to configure or adjust remotely (unless you log into a system on the local subnet). Another issue that stands out is the lack of support for LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) in the XS708E. It does support teaming and trunking through LAGs (Link Aggregation Groups), but you have to configure static LAGs on your other switches in order to use these LAGs.

NETGEAR has to realize that most small or medium sized businesses that are looking into 10Gbe speeds are going to want these features in the product they choose. Fortunately for NETGEAR these items can be corrected with a little effort to make the XS708E a much more rounded product for the market they are aiming it toward. To sum things up the NETGEAR XS708E has a ton of bandwidth available for you to play with and would be a solid addition to the backbone of many SMBs. At least it is if you do not need to remotely configure it, or set up LACP, or setup port and 801.Q based VLans at the same time. While we like the XS708E we are not sure if some the raw bandwidth can overcome some of the missing options that should be present in a switch at this level.

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