What speed of Switches?

[MattGibson]

Hi Everyone,

 

If you were to buy a new switch what speed would you buy?

 

Do you buy a 10/100 24 ports with a 2Gbit uplink or 1Gbit for all ports?

 

Thanks

 

Matt

[Geoff]

Depends where it is and what it's doing. Core switches are 1 Gbit fibre. Interconnect switches are 1Gbit copper. Edge switches are 10/100 with 1Gbit uplinks (Fibre/Copper depending on locale).

 

I'm more interested in the switching capacity than the bandwidth of switches these days, as that seems to be the bottleneck.

[localzuk]

Well... The last upgrade we did here, which was 18 months ago, we bought 100Mb switches, with dual gigabit uplinks. There was no justifiable reason to go with 1000Mb at that point.

 

The next upgrade, in probably 3 1/2 years, will likely be 1000Mb with 10GbE uplinks - but that will require various fibres to be changed, as some of them are not OM3 in the school.

[Michael]

Depends on budget and ultimately, do your machines mostly have 10/100 or gigabit network adapters installed?

 

In most situations I still install 10/100 switches with gigabit uplinks, keeping servers operating at gigabit also.

 

I would also recommend looking at advanced specs of switches, such as onboard memory. I'd much rather buy a quality 10/100 switch over a cheap gigabit one.

[sammy]

I'm more interested in the switching capacity than the bandwidth of switches these days, as that seems to be the bottleneck.

 

totally agree with Geoff, all about switching capacity...and also the feature set on the switches...

 

you really need to plan the network on paper based on what you need to achieve from it over the next 18 months...ie VOIP etc, bear in mind most desktops and notebooks have integrated gigabit NICs etc...

[bossman]

We have a OM3 fibred backbone with cisco 3550 12G core switch and 10 x 48 port cisco 3560 catalyst 100Mb edge switches connected via OM3 fibre links (all clustered) and have found this to be more than adequate, when the Cisco 10Gb switches come down in price I will swap them out accordingly with very little upheaval to the system.

 

I agree with Geoff that it is the quality of the switches throughput which matters and cisco switches have backplanes to support up to 60Gbps as well as all the other protocols such as VOIP, QOS etc etc you only get what you pay for.

[ricki]

Hi

 

I have just had the same choice to make and I placed fibre in the backbone using a gig switch with fibre ports with 10/100 switches with 2 gig ports for all the main switches linked to the fibre switches. The only exception was the ict switch was a full gig switch that connected to the fibre switch because a lot of the ict machine have gig ports in the clients.

 

Richard

[anfy1002]

I agree with bossman. We install copper and fibre and i cannot understand why i still go into schools with recent fibre installs of cheap fibre and non certified copper. The cost of OM3 quality fibre is so cheap now all installers should be using it as a minimum. However i suppose you get what you pay for.