Managed or unmanaged switch?

[BatchFile]

The switch at the middle of our network - the one with all the servers, fibre modules to other cabs etc. in it died this morning (thank goodness it's not term time!). The one that's failed is a Netgear FSM726 that was put in by the company that used to support us, though to the best of my knowledge it was never configured to do anything over and above, well, switch.

 

We don't use VLans or anything like that, so can I get away with replacing it with an unmanaged one and some media convertors? at this stage I can't see why not, but I am more than prepared to be corrected.

[SYNACK]

Use a managed one way more reliable, robust etc and if you ever want or need to use something more advanced you can.

 

Netgear has a lifetime warrenty on some of its gear so that might be worth checking and since you are in the UK they might actually care about you.

 

Edit: looked at the switch spec, if you can't get a replacement free under warrenty go for something managed with gig ports or at the very least web smart partially managed.

Edited April 12, 2011 by SYNACK

[DAZZD88]

Definitely go for managed when dealing with core switches. This way you can use things like Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to prevent outage due to a loopback somewhere on your network. You will also have a log which you can use to identify any ports that have excessive broadcasts on. There are many reasons why you should go for managed over unmanaged.

[plexer]

Definately managed at the core and probably at least web managed elsewhere.

 

Ben

[bio]

+1 Managed switches on core and edge

 

bio..

[Gaz]

+1 managed!

 

Whats your budget for a replacement?

[IanT]

+1 Managed!

 

Always use managed switches on a medium\large network.

 

Many times I've walked into schools where there running un-managed switches all over the place, just sends a shiver down my spine!

[timbo343]

Get yourself a layer 3 switch if you can afford it, then you can setup vlans on it if you wish at a later date. If not, get a managed layer2 one for now... I used to use unmanaged switches until i found out the managed ones were by far much better. To put it into perspective, we used to have about 14 unmanaged switches but as time has gone on, i have been replacing them, now i just need to replace 4~5 of the unmanaged ones, possibly with layer 3 ones from cisco (i have managed to find some about £350 with PoE) so these will do the job nicely.

[gshaw]

High quality, managed switches always. Personally I wouldn't venture away from HP or Cisco (maybe Juniper as well) Edited April 14, 2011 by gshaw