[fog] Switches

[andy_whitlock]

Just wondering what switches you'd recommend? Want to be able to multicast, possibly looking at 10/100/1000 or perhaps 10/100 if the budget won't stretch.

 

Any experience / suggestions welcome!

[featured_spectre]

10/100/1000 would be your best choice, but what is the budget you have?

[andy_whitlock]

It's proposals at this stage, looking for something which will work with fog / multicasting.

[andy_whitlock]

anyone have any recommendations?

[SYNACK]

Most switches will handle multicasts just fine, it only gets more troublesome when there is added complexity like multiple VLANs and routers to get in the way. I would mirror the above suggestion of going 10/100/1000, 100 is not future proof at all.

 

If you can afford it go for a layer 2 managed switch which are generally higher quality and come with longer warrenties and many more features that you can use to make things run better or track down problems.

 

If you budget is more limited go for a websmart switch, this also comes with some extra tools that can make the switch more useful.

 

Last choice would be a completely unmanaged switch but I would only recommend this as a last resort if the budget just will not strech. These have no managment feature, short warrenties and are no help in isolating faults.

 

I like the hp stuff personally as it has a lifetime warrenty and is good quality gear, this may be a little pricey though so 3Com or Netgear could also be worth a look.

[andy_whitlock]

We have netgear 10/100 at the minute (with 1Gb uplinks), multicasting doesn't work well - we do have an L3 switch with static routing at the core of the network, think this is possibly one of the switches that's causing the ghosting issue!