SOHO switch recommendations
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That's why we went to ProCurves at the office. Not as pricey as Cisco but just as good, and leaps above Netgear GSMs. Still might be overkill for me at home.
Hard to beat this price if you are not scared of used products: http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProCurve-2810-24G-J9021A-Managed-Ethernet-Rackmount-Network-Switch/201801862465
(wrong link first)
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I use a netgear GS724Tv4 at home, and I'm really NOT impressed with the product. There are several bugs in the firmware that have been known to netgear for YEARS that they haven't bothered to fix. Very annoying…
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That's why we went to ProCurves at the office. Not as pricey as Cisco but just as good
Not quite, but close.
We have an install (CCTV for police) where we do a massive amount of Multicast traffic. HP can't handle that, whereas Catalysts do it just fine. But that's not everybody's daily task.Last week I talked to a (really friendly and knowledgeable!) Netgear Senior PLM for Managed Switches at a conference. It was about SDVoE (Software Defined Video over Ethernet), AVB/TSN (Audio-Video-Bridging/Time Sensitive Networks) and other currently hot AV-over-IP topics. His remark on HP & Cisco was interesting - those are the only vendors still developing their own chipsets, all others, including Netgear, use Broadcom etc.
Well, I'm not sure with Juniper/Brocade/ExtremeNetworks and such heavies but anyways.
This means that, if you have a designflaw in a chipset, it's not that easy to overcome ^HP.While SDVoE is just Multicast traffic, AVB is a different beast.
Currently we only have ExNet Summit 440 & 460 switches with AVB support and one (1) Netgear GS724T firmware-pimped switch (oops, which is now discontinued). Cisco is going to implement AVB into the Nexus7000 line and will continue to add it down to the 3700 switches with future firmware updates.
I learned that Netgear will not adopt AVB to further products even though they already have some code.
HP and AVB? Not. -
I use a netgear GS724Tv4 at home, and I'm really NOT impressed with the product. There are several bugs in the firmware that have been known to netgear for YEARS that they haven't bothered to fix.
I have several GS-switches here so I'd be very interested to learn what those several bugs are? Maybe I need to avoid or work around something in the future?
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Last week I talked to a (really friendly and knowledgeable!) Netgear Senior PLM for Managed Switches at a conference. It was about SDVoE (Software Defined Video over Ethernet), AVB/TSN (Audio-Video-Bridging/Time Sensitive Networks) and other currently hot AV-over-IP topics. His remark on HP & Cisco was interesting - those are the only vendors still developing their own chipsets, all others, including Netgear, use Broadcom etc.
This means that, if you have a designflaw in a chipset, it's not that easy to overcome ^HP.That's true, but IME the newer commodity netgear stuff is a lot more solid than the older stuff. :)
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@P3R:
I use a netgear GS724Tv4 at home, and I'm really NOT impressed with the product. There are several bugs in the firmware that have been known to netgear for YEARS that they haven't bothered to fix.
I have several GS-switches here so I'd be very interested to learn what those several bugs are? Maybe I need to avoid or work around something in the future?
Off the top of my head (and these may be specific to the GS724Tv4):
If you set the switch to use a NTP server (instead of trying to keep track of time locally), it can often be difficult to get the switch to retain that setting. After a few reboots, it might retain the setting… until the next reboot.
If you are successfully using IPv6 traffic over this switch, you must have IGMP snooping disabled. (Functional IGMP snooping on the switch eats IPv6 RA's.) With this one, people on the netgear forums have claimed that turning off IGMP snooping for all the vlans, but leaving it enabled on the ports, will resolve the issue. In fact, it effectively causes snooping to be disabled (but anything already in the snooping table will still show up until it times out. So, if you do this and wait 24 hours, the snooping table will be empty.)
The IPv6 equivalent of IGMP snooping (MLB or something like that) is horribly broken.
....
Don't get me wrong - it's a decent switch if you don't want all the features to work. Some people are okay with that, especially considering the low price of the switch. However, even though I don't care of my switch knows the correct time, and I can live without IGMP snooping on my home network (heh), I'm still not impressed with the product.
If I wanted a proper managed switch (which the GS724T doesn't claim to be), based on my experience with THIS product, I'd look somewhere other than netgear. I'd hate to drop several hundred dollars on a "real" managed switch only to get buggy firmware and a company that isn't interested in fixing their bugs.
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If you are successfully using IPv6 traffic over this switch, you must have IGMP snooping disabled.
Is this really still an issue?
IIRC, I don't have that switch anymore:
I ran into this about 9 years ago with a GS-108Tv1 and filed a ticket with their support. Altough it was never mentioned in the Release Notes, I'm quite confident that I was suprised because it actually worked a few firmware versions later. But maybe they had to take it out again because it broke something else. Or I misconfigured it back then and I'm completely wrong here. :) -
Funny, I distinctly recall all sorts of NTP errors with the GSM series, including one that could never sync up. That was still better than another unit which would hard reset if you dared to save the configuration.
From what it sounds like the suggestions are to either go with an enterprise level solution such as a Cisco or HP (at relatively high cost unless buying used) or find something more commodity-oriented with a better management software stack. Does that sound about right?
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Bought 2 SG300-10 in 2010, still running fine and still getting firmware updates. 191€ a piece back then.
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Off the top of my head…
Thanks for answering.
…(and these may be specific to the GS724Tv4):
If you set the switch to use a NTP server (instead of trying to keep track of time locally), it can often be difficult to get the switch to retain that setting. After a few reboots, it might retain the setting... until the next reboot.
Yes at least this one must be specific to the v4. I guess I was lucky to get the v3s then.
I have two GS724Tv3, five GS108Tv2 and one XS712T all using ntp and I've never experienced that or any other ntp-related issue on any of them.
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Funny, I distinctly recall all sorts of NTP errors with the GSM series, including one that could never sync up. That was still better than another unit which would hard reset if you dared to save the configuration.
From what it sounds like the suggestions are to either go with an enterprise level solution such as a Cisco or HP (at relatively high cost unless buying used) or find something more commodity-oriented with a better management software stack. Does that sound about right?
It really depends on what you're looking for. The original request was for a basic switch for a not-networking-oriented user. The netgear "smart" switches provide basic functionality and throw in a few features that you might find useful for about the same price as something with no additional functionality at all. Some of the features on the netgear may be a bit flaky (though, don't get me started on the crazy matrix of cisco firmware level limitations) and if you're really trying to do stuff like ipv6 l3 routing or igmp snooping you should probably spend more money on something else. BUT, you're very likely to want a 10gbe upgrade in the not so distant future as the cost of that gear keeps falling, so why spend money on a higher end 1gbe solution now if you're not likely to really utilize the added functionality before you get around to a 10gbe upgrade? Only you can decide what your actual priorities are, but make sure you're buying the thing that you're looking for and not the thing that someone else is looking for.