Which Managed Switch?

[JohnHuntington]

I've got a little money to spec out a managed switch for teaching purposes that will also be used in our haunted hotel network, which will next year have streaming IP video, show control, and GrandMA2 lighting data.

I've seen a bunch of the HP stuff on shows, any recommendations on good units, or other brands?

Thanks!

 

[sk8rsdad]

Techsoup.org has a number of Cisco models available, assuming you or an organization you work with qualifies for their program. HP makes good gear too.

 

[epimetheus]

I've got a couple of 3com managed 10/100 switches at home that I picked up second on the HardOCP forums. They've been great for testing purposes. I even managed to pick up a POE managed switch off ebay. If you're buying new though, I'd go for HP. I've got an aversion to Cisco, mostly because I haven't had the chance to learn the IOS interface. HP's web management is decent and easy to figure out.

 

[cpf]

Dell also makes decent products, and more importantly, decent management interfaces that don't require a certification to operate. If you have lots of IP video you'll probably want to go for gigabit speeds, 100mbps will get congested very quickly with more than a few cameras running at high resolutions (if that's your situation).

 

[Footer]

Hey John,
What do you want to do with your switch? How complex do you see your networks getting? Would VLANS be helpful to you? What specifically do you want to manage? Do you want your students to start to learn how Cisco gear works? Cisco is the default switch out there in the market, the odds of your students coming into contact with that gear is pretty high. Avoiding it just makes the problem worse. Learning IOS far enough to set up a switch is not really that difficult. Most of the Cisco Certs focus more on router configuration and general network management then how to set up their switches. For a guy who can program C in his sleep and is just fine using a command line via a terminal window, I think you could pick up IOS rather quickly. Also, Cisco does now have GUI interfaces for their gear. I wish they would have had that 6 years ago when I was doing my CCNA!

You can pick up Cisco 2950 switches rather cheap right now used. They were the default switch out there for a number of years. Right now their default small switch is the 2960. Its rock solid hardware. You really can't beat it.

 

[derekleffew]

I wonder how much more this is Pathway Connectivity Inc. - Pathport VIA Gigabit Switch than something one would pick up at CompUSA?

 

[museav]

I don't know your situation, but for some time I was specifying HP ProCurve switches, then I started running into multiple corporate and educational campuses where the switches allowed to be used on the campus were dictated to me by their IT staff. And as Kyle noted, that usually meant Cisco and I often end up with the 2950/2960 switches he mentioned.

 

[JohnHuntington]

Thanks to all for the tips! I went down the Cisco 2960 route, but that ended up being out of our budget. I found this "Linksys by Cisco" switch, though, that seems to do what we want:
Cisco SGE2000P 24-port Gigabit Switch - PoE - Managed Switches - SGE2000P - CDWG.com

The things I think I need are:
Gigabit (we're going to use this for an IP-video surveilance system and other purposes)
PoE (to run the cameras)
IGMP Snooping
VLans
Non-Blocking
QoS

This one seems to do everything I want, and is cheap enough that I could probably buy four.

Any thoughts?

John

 

[ToddH]

The Pathway unit is a bit more than one you can buy a Cisco or Dell for. However it is specifically built for the entertainment world. It is much easier to manage for people versed in entertainment. You don't need to be an IT administrator to program it... I highly recommend looking into it.

 

[Sony]

We use two Dell PowerConnect 3524P managed switches in our lighting network here at NNHS and so far we have had no trouble, they are both streaming 256 universes of ETCNet3/sACN without any issues. Granted we are only using 4 or 5 of those universes right now. The switches also offer automatically detected Power-over-Ethernet if you need it.