Network switch sought
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The NetGear M4100-series would probably meet your needs at a reasonable price. You can drop the point of entry considerably if you give up the console as well and stick to a web-managed switch.
If he wants uptime, I would recommend he stay far, far away from Netgear.
<snip>Seriously, stay away from Netgear if you value your time at all.</snip>This is blown way out of proportion. From your comment on the web interfaces, it sounds like you've been using "Smart" switches like the GS-series.
They were using a mix of FS, GS, GSM, and M series. All of them had problems, no exceptions, even the switches from 2012 with the latest firmware. Around 1,000 nodes spanning over ~30 switches and a GSM7328FS core, it was just constant hardware issues (fan failures, flash failures, port failures), firmware issues (management interface just plain not accepting traffic, web interface completely locking out or throwing javascript errors brand new out of the box), or speed issues (getting 5 Mb/s from a brand new gigabit switch seems reasonable, right? And the temporary 2950 that replaced it got full 100 Mb/s from the same file on the same server in the same configuration). I'll stick by what I said: stay away from Netgear.
Interesting. I've not had that experience.
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Have you looked at HP? I like HP because they have good gear and the command line is very similar to Cisco so it's not hard to learn at all, you will probably pick it up quickly. I know you said that you don't have Cisco experience but there are tons of videos on the internet that can help. HP ProCurve 2910al-24G for around $1400 isn't bad, HP gear comes with a lifetime warrenty too.
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Wow, it's really good to hear all of the input. One of my pet peaves with many of the products out there is no one really addresses the questions of "why would I want to use your product?", or more importantly: "what do you do that's better than the other guy", or even the most important ones like "why do I care?"
I have a couple of procurves. I can't remember the model number, but I recall I couldn't assign ports to vlans without using the comandline menu interface: the web interface would not do it. Once past that though, they work pretty well.
I do need to run down some of those other models, but Please keep it coming!
–jason
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I'm pretty sure you can do that in the gui, but I cant remember I always do it from the command line. I can show you how if the gui is a issue. Im almost 99% sure the gui isnt a issue for simple things like that.
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Confirmed you can configure VLANs from the Web GUI. I have a Procurve 2810-24G. I got mine of of ebay for $200 not sure if you are in the used market just wanted to provide a helpful data point.
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Since we're all over the place on this, could you give us some idea of your intended use, availability requirements, and budget?
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You are right Jason: I should have listed those too.
I am serving websites at a colo facility. We host about 80 websites but are considering doing it legitimately, and larger-scale. At the moment it's a single pfsense firewall, a network switch, and some apache servers.
I am aiming at a 99.9% uptime, but not sure what my budget is (it's kind of adhoc: I am moving us away from that). I wish to go to a high availability network (carp firewalls, two switches…). I expect the switch(s) to handle a couple of vlans, and let (r)stp handle issues where a switch goes down. If necessary, it would be nice if the stp on the switch handle stp to/from pfsense.
I could probably be fine using fast ethernet, but I may need to move data between servers, so gigabit is desired.
I guess the biggest thing here is to have a switch that is good enough but not painful to use.
I have been looking around. I looked at both hp and cisco.
the cisco SG200 series appears to be a nice combination of price/functionality/reputation
the hp 1810-24g also looks good.Thanks!
--jason
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99.9% is almost 9 hours of downtime per year. That's a lot.
The SG200-series is pretty far from your original requirements. They're just rebadged parts from the a Linksys acquisition.
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Oh, does that mean a web interface and crappy network performance?
When you say "that's a lot" do you mean "that's a lot of down time" or "that's a lot of uptime"? :)
I certainly haven't chosen the cisco. In fact the cisco, netgear, and HP prices seem to be comparable. Mostly I am putting together some estimates for my boss.
I already have a netgear GS716T in place. I suppose I could just get another one.
–jason
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Brocade ICX 6430
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Oh, does that mean a web interface and crappy network performance?
When you say "that's a lot" do you mean "that's a lot of down time" or "that's a lot of uptime"? :)
I certainly haven't chosen the cisco. In fact the cisco, netgear, and HP prices seem to be comparable. Mostly I am putting together some estimates for my boss.
I already have a netgear GS716T in place. I suppose I could just get another one.
–jason
9 hours annually for network downtime is a lot. Most providers I've worked with guarantee 99.99% network uptime, if not 99.999% or even 100%. It's just not that hard to build a redundant core network.
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Have you looked at Dell PowerConnect? Can get 24-port, Gb, layer 3 switches for under $2k.
Have older 6224 running on SAN duty for over two years with no problems.http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/powerconnect-6200-series/pd?refid=powerconnect-6200-series&baynote_bnrank=0&baynote_irrank=0&~ck=baynoteSearch&isredir=true
Vince
