ConSentry makes switches that support NAC, and that is how the company hyped itself when it started out, but the gear does a lot more.

One customer says he bought ConSentry’s LANShield equipment because he needed more switch ports in his network to supplement Cisco gear he already had, and chose the lesser known vendor because of these additional features. (Compare access switches)

Certainly, the NAC restrictions the switches can impose on guest users was an important factor in the decision to buy, but other features helped carry the day as well. (Compare NAC products)

For instance the equipment can block and isolate malware to contain damage to networks as well as give valuable data about traffic across the network down to the file level. The traffic data has value to both network administrators and to business-side managers that want to track who has accessed what. That is visibility into the network that this particular user didn’t have before.

The gear also blocks Internet traffic by domain, URL, even keywords, making it a less comprehensive and less elegant form of content filtering gear.

The point this ConSentry customer was making is that for the price of a switch, it is possible to get a switch that can deliver extras. These extras might not be as fleshed out as buying a separate platform that also provide these extras, but they can approximate them.

In situations where budgets are tight, this gear could help plug a few holes that might otherwise go unprotected.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.