Switch Project

[caffrey]

I'm tempted by the unifi switches too, but not seen a lot of talk about them

[Asgard]

We are a full Netgear site and have their new M6100 Chasis as our core with two M7100 (24 port 10gb copper) in our backup datacentre- the two m7100 are linked to eachother via MLAG.

 

We have our old core (6 x GSM7352S) sitting there for failover, but it's turned off, and I'll probably look to offload it soon.

 

Our Edge stacks comprise of over 40 of the GS752TXS 10gb edge switches across the campus. Mostly in stacks of 4 & 5. With 20 of the GS724TP (PoE switches) which run our Mitel VOIP phones and Ruckus APs linked into the stacks via a 2gb LAG.

 

All edge cabinets connect to the core at a minimum of 10gb, film and media building is 20gb , with the two datacentres linked via 4x10gb links.

 

Never had a problem with any of it, so much so we now have three of their ReadyData SANs - One runs our hyper-v 2012r2 cluster shared volume. Another is a replica , the third is now an offsite replica.

 

We are a large sixth form college with around 1400 students (and 500 evening students), 300 staff, 1600 devices.

 

Oh we have a voip system too (Mitel) but have no QOS/COS setup - it's just not needed with the amount of bandwidth we have.

 

Cisco CCIE who is a mate of mine said the CLI commands are virtually identical with cisco.

 

Haters gonna hate.

Edited March 14, 2015 by Asgard

[m25man]

I'd stick with HP because a one eyed monkey with half a brain cell and two thumbs can set them up and keep them running.

 

Netgear will do the job for half the price and in many cases be more flexible in a stack config than an HP chassis but...

 

Managing NetGear switches can be hard work, VLANS and Trunking can be a challenge especially if you want them to play nicely with other vendors hardware.

 

It's all about the topology nowadays with demands for 10Gbe across campus and in the Virtualisation closet makes Netgear a hard option to ignore.

 

If you're patient and willing to learn and build from the ground up Netgear will save you a packet, if you want an easy life then HP is the easy option.

 

Back to that old favourite Fast, Cheap, Good pick any two...

Edited March 14, 2015 by m25man

[pow]

I hadn't either, but the school concerned didn't have a lot of money and I have a good relationship with 4gon who supplied it to me, I said if it's rubbish it's coming back to them... I've got the old Cisco 2950 as a standby just in case. So far it seems pretty good, you do have to do some working out of the settings on the Unifi controller but once you've got it it seems very good. If no-one ever tries these products how are we going to know if they are any good

 

This school is so small it just had 2 24 port switches in one cabinet - that services the whole school. They were both at capacity and that was before I snuck 6 Unifi APs in so I have kept the newer 2950 as a switch to run printers/photocopier/couple of pi's that don't need gigabit and given the entire cab a little more breathing space with the 48 port 500W Unifi switch. Also, meant I got to ditch 6 power injectors as the Unifi switch powers the UAP-ACs without breaking a sweat. Happy days.

[roadhouse1387]

a pair of Cisco cat4500X in your core with a VSS configuration will give you 1.6Tbps of throughput max, along with resilience. The bulk of the price in a 10Gig network is usually the optics, but in fact, most schools dont really need 10Gbps. egress buffer size and efficiency are far more important than raw bandwidth.

 

You would be surprised how cheap a Cisco 4500X VSS core coupled with 2960X switches at the edge will be. And of course, you are getting all those really valuable enterprise features you usually have to pay extra for in an HP box, such as RPVST+ (not available at all in HP or anyone else switches for that matter), Enterprise routing, VRF , PIM Multicast suport and so on, and at 1:1 port to back-plane over-subscription, i.e none. You can of course, save even more cash buy going 1gig SFP to start with then move to 10Gig on a stack by stack basis when you need to.

 

There are fewer industries where the phrase 'you get what you pay for' applies more than networks.

 

PM me if you want to chat

Cheers