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.