Im surprised nobody has mentioned FS.com. They are essentially 'reference' implementation of Broadcom switch platforms. I was in exactly the same situation and ended up with something like the S3150-8T2FP @
FS S3150-8T2FP 8-Port Fanless Gigabit Managed PoE+ Switch with 2 1Gb SFP Uplinks 150W - FS Germany or something like it. They essentially built switches with most variations in ports, power and management (unmanaged, noob-managed with some wanky 'smart managed' nonsense and normal managed).
Even on the cheapest 'partially' managed models it has reasonable features:
- Up to 8 PoE+ Ports, Total Budget 65W
- Fanless Design, Always Working Silently (this has got to be some chinglish)
- Support VLAN, ACL, QoS, etc.
- L2+ Enterprise-Level Features
- Complete Security Polices
- Support CLI/SSH/Telnet/WEB GUI/SNMP for Flexible Operation
The 'problem' with most switches is that you either get a consumer tier thing which often ends up having 1 or 2 fabric ASICs with some basic MAC and VLAN support, usually between 5 and 16 ports. Everything beyond that nearly immediately ends up in the next tier of ASICs that start with 48 ports or with 16 SFP+ ports and 10G ports etc, but between those two there isn't a whole lot, except hacky stuff where they abuse the inter-ASIC link for fake 10G and 40G ports that end up linking correctly but have no buffers or 'add-on' SRAM buffers that can barely hold a handful of frames. Most of the time it's simply not economical for the ASCI manufacturers to make something in between, and unlike multicore CPUs you almost never can fuse off the bad cores and sell it as a lower tier chip; a bad ASIC simply won't switch packets.
Due to the nature of SDN there has been a bit of a market for the smaller port counts where the forwarding fabric is combined for fewer but faster ports (so for a 10G uplink) but those are generally just as costly as a full switch and mostly useful for size-constrained installations like 10inch mobile racks. And then there's NBaseT which also made a bit of a change in switch ASIC land where the chips suddenly had a disconnect between port count and switch fabric bandwidth where one doesn't always affect the other. Still relatively early on the mass production for those (think 2.5G and 5G links) but that would get more 'dynamic' fabric configurations for smaller requirements like your wish for a reasonable switch with PoE and a few extra ports but with good speeds.
