New Switch?

[SYNACK]

I would suggest going gigabit, despite having a gigabit core you would still see a performance increase if and when you got come gig clients in as it means that clients will have access to more bandwidth unless you have ten other machines on the same switch all attempting to use as much bandwidth as they can at exactly the same time.

 

At the moment you have a clear need for a new switch which is easily justifyable where as an upgrade of an already working switch in future may be a much harder sell. It will probably be easier in the long run to go for gig now rather than attempting to justify it to non technical types later.

 

As to gig certified wireing, this does not matter too much for client runs, as long as you have semi-decent cable - read all pairs wired in - then it should run gig. Maybe not as fast even though it will still report at 1GB/s but it should still run. We have some old cat5 (not e) which runs gig at around 30m. This manages about half the speed of the 5e and less still than the 6 but it is still much faster than the 100mb/s from before.

 

I suggest geting a switch with trunking support so that you can use two backbone links in future if funds become avalible to add more trunks which will allow for double the bandwidth back to the core.

 

Also you are right almost all new hardware now comes with GB NICs in it.

[Snuffkins]

If you're short of funds then i would probably be inclinded to go with something inexpensive dlink or netgear would do the job for you. It'd be worth looking for something fully managed if for nothing more than the Becta Technical Review. If you are likely to get funding in the future then you could even go along the line of a refurb or end user piece of equipment that would do a more than adequate job until you could afford to put something better in it's place and then of course you have a spare in case of failures ICT-Direct would be a good place to start.

 

If funding is a real problem we have a fair few switches you could pick from to get you out of a hole if you wanted? They're old dlinks or allied telesyn switches but they're not bad and they'll do the job.

 

I wouldn't worry about future planning as if you're going to go 10gb in the future buying a gig switch now doesn't necessarily mean it'll be able to take a 10gb fibre module and the switches that have architecture designed for that are usually a fair bit more pricey. Even Dlinks option is about 2.5-3k plus the module. So really you're probably best off doing what you thought and going with a 10/100 with a couple of gig ports to link back.