Help me pick out some new switches

[SpatiallyAware]

The switches at my company are long overdue for replacement. It seems like every other week a port is dying and one or more people are down while IT tracks it all down.

Right now we have dlink dgs-1224t, no fiber connections or anything like that. There are ~8 24 port switches, some are daisy-chained to each other rather than connected in a star pattern off of a backbone switch (this is something they're saying needs corrected ASAP)


Any suggestions on what to replace them with? We need something capable of fairly high throughput.. IE for what we do 100mb won't work, I suspect 1000mb may even be a bottleneck especially with the current configuration.

Right now I've been recommended the netgear gs724

http://www.amazon.com/GS724T-300-Pro.../dp/B00358MP02


Any thoughts on this? I've read a little bit about 10gb backplanes but my guys are telling me this would be HUGELY expensive.. Like instead of $4k we would be talking $40k. I'm thinking the best setup would be 1000gb ports for each client and then 10gb port to the backbone switch.

I have no needs for monitoring, QOS or true layer 3 stuff. An easy way to setup ACL via mac address would be nice. I've also been shown switches that let you login via IP and see which ports are bad and that sort of stuff which would be nice.


Thanks!

 

[imagoon]

Personally whenever I have used Netgear for anything other than dumb switches, my life became a temporary hell.

What is your budget? If your seriously looking at $249 switches I guess it can't be much. I would rather seem money get spent on Juniper / ProCurve / The lower end Cisco (not linksys) gear.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

Personally whenever I have used Netgear for anything other than dumb switches, my life became a temporary hell.

What is your budget? If your seriously looking at $249 switches I guess it can't be much. I would rather seem money get spent on Juniper / ProCurve / The lower end Cisco (not linksys) gear.

Hmm.. budget is whatever I'm willing to spend I suppose. Right now we have ~$250 switches and they work ok other than friggin dead ports (I guess that means they're not ok)


I'd like to spend no more than $500-$750 per switch unless it's really required. Most of this is based off the fact that I need something reliable, not necessarily customizable.

I'm not stuck on netgear.. That's just what I was recommended thus far

 

[SpatiallyAware]

Some more info.. We have a fairly simple setup..

Most server type devices are on this one 24 port switch.

I have ~100 employees, ~20 'other' ports for offices and a couple voip situations.

Right now they're all these dlink dgs 1224t.


I'm thinking we should move to a 10gb switch for the server stuff, and then connect ~6 24 port switches to it with 10gb connection, then each client gets 1gb port.

I have no needs for vlans, advanced routing, or anything really complicated like that. I mainly want something reliable that's built well, rather than super customizable. I also don't want to have to hire a cisco guy every time it needs messed with.

 

[imagoon]

I have always been a fan of the Cisco 2960G-48TC for edge switching but I think the those are going to be at least 1k each. You have a me a bit confused though 10Gig tends to be big $$ but you want really cheap for the edge.

If you are going for a pure "dumb" switch, some of the Dell ones are decently cheap and work well. If you need managed I would lean towards Procurve if you are really on a budget.

PS Cisco is easy. Most of them have a GUI for basic operation. You could also grab the CCNP Switching book on Amazon and give yourself a decent crash course over a week and have the swing of most of it.

Did you want specific models?

 

[drebo]

10gig is very expensive. You're looking at a couple thousand per switch. Optics for 10gig are also very expensive...to the tune of $1k+ per port.

The Juniper EX3300 works great as an access or distribution switch. It's gigabit with 10gig uplinks. For a 10gig server switch, you could use the EX2500, which is 24 SFP+ ports, all of which are 10gig capable. You'll need new NICs for your servers.

If you want to go Cisco, the 2960S is good for your access switches.

Pick a budget, identify what features you need, and call a few consultants to get a quote. 100 ports of gigabit with 10gig backhaul isn't cheap, and you'll do better if you have multiple people bidding on it.

I'd stay away from the cheap SOHO crap for an install of this size, especially if you need any sort of advanced features (VLANs, etc).

 

[JAG87]

Forget NetGear. In that price range, I would buy

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...annel&CMP=OTC-

If you have more budget, than you can go with

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...135.30-2755886

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...135.30-2755874

Do you need PoE?

 

[SpatiallyAware]

Wow thanks a ton for tips.

I'd prefer to not have to send anyone to get trained on cisco stuff. It just doesn't feel necessary for what we do here.

No need for POE, QOS, VLAN, or anything other than maybe port monitoring (if that's the correct term.. It would be nice to be able to login to a switch and get info about ports versus just waiting until a client acts up and then moving them to a new port)

 

[SpatiallyAware]

10gig is very expensive. You're looking at a couple thousand per switch. Optics for 10gig are also very expensive...to the tune of $1k+ per port.

The Juniper EX3300 works great as an access or distribution switch. It's gigabit with 10gig uplinks. For a 10gig server switch, you could use the EX2500, which is 24 SFP+ ports, all of which are 10gig capable. You'll need new NICs for your servers.

If you want to go Cisco, the 2960S is good for your access switches.

Pick a budget, identify what features you need, and call a few consultants to get a quote. 100 ports of gigabit with 10gig backhaul isn't cheap, and you'll do better if you have multiple people bidding on it.

I'd stay away from the cheap SOHO crap for an install of this size, especially if you need any sort of advanced features (VLANs, etc).

I'm willing to skip on 10gb. I'd say $1000 per switch is my upper limit but that's only if I can get 10gb between switches at that price.

 

[JAG87]

I'm willing to skip on 10gb. I'd say $1000 per switch is my upper limit but that's only if I can get 10gb between switches at that price.

I gotta be honest, at this point in time, I would just get the $300 Cisco and just wait for 10gb prices to come down. Investing $1000 in a gigabit switch doesn't make sense at this point, we are no more than 3 years away from 10gb becoming common in consumer products.

What kind of cabling do you have in the office anyways?

 

[drebo]

I'm willing to skip on 10gb. I'd say $1000 per switch is my upper limit but that's only if I can get 10gb between switches at that price.

Like I said, the optics alone are $1k per PORT for 10gig. That means that to connect two switches together, you're looking at $2k just for the optics. The switches themselves are more expensive.

Also, 10gig between switches will be of moderate use, though, depending on the distribution of traffic between your servers and the number of servers you have.

You can get the EX2200 for ~$1k per switch. This is a linerate switch.

On the Cisco side of things, you can get the 2960G for a little more than the EX2200, but I don't remember if it's oversubscribed or not.

 

[imagoon]

I gotta be honest, at this point in time, I would just get the $300 Cisco and just wait for 10gb prices to come down. Investing $1000 in a gigabit switch doesn't make sense at this point, we are no more than 3 years away from 10gb becoming common in consumer products.

What kind of cabling do you have in the office anyways?

We are not talking consumer here. Most of the corporate level "we want it to work, and work at the rated speed" gear is still easily $2000-$3000 for 48 ports of Gigabit with enough backplane power to make it worth it.

I wouldn't be concerned about 10gig. I would be more interested in getting gear where I could aggregate channels to the core.

48 ports -> 2 or 4 1 gig etherchannel to the core would likely work fine for a 100 person environment unless there is extra stuff like CAD. The fact that he doesn't want "advanced features" like vlans and the like make me suspect that the needs of the company are pretty low since those features really start getting used around a 50-100 person company and above.

I also enjoyed the 4 years of uptime I had until we lost power long enough for the UPS / backups to fail. It was a sad day doing a controlled shutdown on all that gear that had not been powered off in 4 years 1month and some days.

 

[rickards]

The new Procurve 3800 series comes in many different configurations and prices, also they
are stackable which i think is a advantage.

If you choose to stack you get easy management (they work like one switch) and also no problems with loops.

There are models with 10G or SFP+ and 24-48G ports depending what you need. HP switches comes with lifetime warranty and free support and firmware upgrades.

The disadvantage with HP Procurve in my opinion is that they lack cutting edge features that Cisco and other more expensive brands have but if you need bang for the bucks they are a good choice.

I have used them for a few years and they have good performance and low failure rate, the only problems have been a dead port but that is very rare.

If youre going for 10G then you need Cat6A cabling, preferred shielded.

 

[robmurphy]

If you are tight budget checkout the Cisco SMB 300 range. The range includes gigbit switches
They are as good or better than HP or Netgear switches at similar prices. I do think they are stackable though. Do make sure they have the latest firmware thoug. Despite what some here will say these are noy linksys, they are Cisco SMB.

I have the 100 and the 1000 versions deployed and so far they have not caused any customer problems.

The switches are managed using a web interface, so you do not need to know IOS.

Rob.

 

[Jamsan]

What is it that your company does that you think requires 1gig to the desktop and 10gig to servers?

 

[SpatiallyAware]

What is it that your company does that you think requires 1gig to the desktop and 10gig to servers?

Autocad and Revit.

Revit talks back to a central model quite a bit, we have had some occasional speed issues with huge models that have more than 9-10 people poking around in them. My CAD guy has asked if we could go to a 10gb backplane if possible and network guys are on the fence regarding whether 10gb is needed. I'm against it primarily due to cost, and the fact that others in my industry haven't needed this yet - particular at our size.

My reseller is pushing that netgear switch in my OP. Everyone is confident that server harddrive access speeds etc are fine, and that this is network related.

I'm leaning towards that ~$350 cisco solution. In my opinion that should be fine if properly setup.

 

[drebo]

9-10 people accessing the same model causes speed issues?

It's highly likely that the server itself is the bottleneck there.

 

[imagoon]

You need to throw some monitoring on the gear/server/storage then and see what the issue is.

--edit--

Which Drebo beat me to.

My $ is on the disk subsystem. What kind of server is hosting their shares and are they sharing with the rest of the company's shares?

 

[SpatiallyAware]

9-10 people accessing the same model causes speed issues?

It's highly likely that the server itself is the bottleneck there.

I want to say that this model is like 4gb or something... I'm talking huge huge huge....

FYI.. This was limited to a few people having speed issues. From what I understand they found a problem with the specific switch they were all connected to, which was replaced last week. The network guys complain that ports fail on an individual basis, sometimes power cycling fixes it but usually temporarily.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

You need to throw some monitoring on the gear/server/storage then and see what the issue is.

--edit--

Which Drebo beat me to.

My $ is on the disk subsystem. What kind of server is hosting their shares and are they sharing with the rest of the company's shares?

The active work shares are off of a dell MD3000, I'm not sure if its exact setup but it's supposed to be fast. We've done lots of benchmarks/bottleneck tests and found no problems.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

Also... This specific slowdown issue cropped up when the ~10 people were on that one revit model, but there are usually 50++ other people doing CAD/Revit stuff at the same time although not on the same model.

 

[imagoon]

The active work shares are off of a dell MD3000, I'm not sure if its exact setup but it's supposed to be fast. We've done lots of benchmarks/bottleneck tests and found no problems.

MD3000 is DAS so it is only as fast as the [server] controller controlling it. Are you not running continual monitoring? Stuff like Nagios / Cacti are free and would stop you from firing from your hip on the issue.

 

[SpatiallyAware]

MD3000 is DAS so it is only as fast as the [server] controller controlling it. Are you not running continual monitoring? Stuff like Nagios / Cacti are free and would stop you from firing from your hip on the issue.

Ah I'm not directly dealing with this stuff, just trying to gleam some information from you guys before sitting down with everyone and deciding what to do. We have had nagios setup before, I believe we're using something else right now.. NMS something? Not really sure to be honest.

I have a consultant company who helps us with the more expensive and complicated setups, I believe the md3000 is connected correctly to a fast server. I really don't believe it's server related, as only certain people have issues and they're all isolated to one switch.

 

[JoeMcJoe]

Avoid those Netgear, web interface crashes, makes it hard to use.