Low power layer 3 switch?

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J--

Active Member
Aug 13, 2016
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I don't need a ton of packet capacity; just looking to clean up my rack and not burn too many watts in the process. GbE is plenty as well; I'll have the QFPs+ setup point-to-point for the foreseeable future.

Layer 3 would be nice for VLAN capability, but perhaps I can deal w/ a couple layer 2s instead as long as they don't suck down too much power.
 

pyro_

Active Member
Oct 4, 2013
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Take a look at the cisco sg series of switches I know that the SG300 and up have some L3 capability
 

fractal

Active Member
Jun 7, 2016
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What are your requirements for L3? I get vlans on my L2 HP1800's. Fast, cheap, quiet, low power. I love em.

I have a SG300 too. I am only using it as a dumb switch right now. The one I have seems ok. I paid more for the 10 port SG300 than I did for a 48 port 1800 or a 24 port 1800.
 

Jerry Renwick

Active Member
Aug 7, 2014
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I heard that fs.com recently released their Self-Developed 48SFP with 4SFP+ switch, the max power consumption is 85W with integration of Layer 2 to Layer 4 packet processing engine. Maybe this is an option for you.
 
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Jon Massey

Active Member
Nov 11, 2015
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What a surprise, Jerry Renwick recommends something from fiberstore! ;)

Looks fairly interesting but totally unproven and not yet available. Very scant details on the website, too.
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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What a surprise, Jerry Renwick recommends something from fiberstore! ;)

Looks fairly interesting but totally unproven and not yet available. Very scant details on the website, too.
And who really uses 1GbE SPF's to their servers, if it's a SFP cage/formfactor better be 10GbE SFP+, I want my other GbE connectivity to be copper 98-99% of the time (other than an uplink to another legacy switch possibly over an SFP port) so yeah it does seem like an overpriced 'oddball' offering to me.
 

J--

Active Member
Aug 13, 2016
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What are your requirements for L3? I get vlans on my L2 HP1800's. Fast, cheap, quiet, low power. I love em.

I have a SG300 too. I am only using it as a dumb switch right now. The one I have seems ok. I paid more for the 10 port SG300 than I did for a 48 port 1800 or a 24 port 1800.

@fractal, thanks for the lead on the 1800s, question for anyone who's familiar though; w/ the VLAN setup on a Layer2, I suspect that your throughput between the VLANs is limited by your uplink to your router? Said a different way; all the inter-VLAN traffic would get pushed through the router instead of across the switch?

Just thinking out loud while I'm weighing my options.
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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Yes, you are correct, if you only have a Layer 2 switch, "router on a stick" will entail sending all your inter-VLAN traffic to a separate router and back over trunk links. There are various features used in multi-layer switches that allow routing between VLAN's, but a routing process of some kind must still occur between broadcast domains, however it's implemented. On a multi-layer switch you have the speed advantage in that not all packets destined for the same broadcast domain need to actually be routed. After the switch learns from routing the initial packets to the same location, it can simply switch them instead :)
 

Mike Bailey

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Sep 24, 2015
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Anyone know any other options?

I have a pair of LB4Ms that I was playing around with but they suck down power and generate a ton of heat and noise.

The other route I was looking was picking up a pair of 3560G as these are relatively light on power and noise by comparison. A nice plus is they are extremely feature rich with the right code version**

Once I started looking down that direction I figured may as well go all the way and just get the Nexus 3048. That gives you 48x 1 GbE copper, 4x 10G SFP+. It's a bit harder getting the right licensing on these guys without forking over a grand or two. But you can LACP that spans the two switches via vPC, and you get a very compact feature set that eliminates a lot of legacy crap that you don't really need.


** I work at a Cisco shop so I can get the latest code versions
 

ryan

New Member
May 30, 2011
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I've had my eye on the Juniper EX2200-C-12T-2G for quite a while to serve similar purposes. It's compact, has no fans so is completely silent, very low power consumption (~30W according to the specs), etc.
As a cheaper alternative (which I've owned for >5 years now) I'd second the recommendation of the Cisco SG300-10. It's versatile, fast, and has similar layer3 capabilities.
 

J--

Active Member
Aug 13, 2016
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I ended up grabbing a Netgear GS752TP switch for a bargain, which is a L2+/L3 lite switch. I measured around 38w idle. It has fans so it's not anywhere near silent, but no louder than my 3U Supermicro chassis, so it's tolerable. I'm still bumbling through the setup, but so far so good.

Bonus is it does PoE over all ports, which eliminates the need for me to get another PoE switch. No 10Gb SFP+ though.