I've been asked to help my employer find a couple of replacement switches for his office network. This is a very small company, and there's no official IT department or network administrator(s), so the switch will have to be set up and maintained by me. (I'm not a proficient network administrator. I can get by, but my chosen profession is software engineering...)
This is all coming up because the people who manage our VOIP phone (mitel) systems are blaming everything on the network and are avoiding doing any work on their system until the switches are updated. (Honestly, I agree that the switches should be updated... we're currently using a rag-tag collection of left-over "dumb" switches that require prayer and that we sacrifice a virgin lamb before each reboot.)
What we need is a 24 port POE "semi managed" switch (POE on all 24 ports for VOIP phones with a total of around 160watts power budget) and a 48 port non-POE semi managed switch. Both should be gigabit switches. (Having one POE and one non-POE switch is to reduce the cost.)
By "semi-managed", I mean that the switches should have some managed features, but don't need to be full blown L3 routing capable switches that sing, dance, and wash dishes. They need to support VLAN's (both 802.1q tagged and port-based VLANs), spanning tree (to make the phone people happy because they insist that STP is a magic bullet that'll fix all the world's problems even if there's no loops), LACP, and perhaps some type of mechanism for dealing with packet storms. (Netgear calls it "storm control")
We'd like the two switches to be from the same manufacturer in order to avoid any incompatibilities.
The only other requirement I'd have for the switches would be that they are rated to handle the amount of traffic that they have ports for. They are rare these days, but I still on occassion see switches that will choke on full loads of traffic.
The boss wants NEW (not used) switches. The phone people suggested 2x 48 port POE HP Aruba switches that they'd be happy to sell us. We don't need that, and really don't want to spend $3k (USD) on them. I suggested a pair of netgear switches (GS748T and GS728TP-100NAS) based on me being familiar with Netgear's "semi managed" line of routers. That kind of covers the top and bottom ends of the budget.
Can anyone please suggest other pairs that would meet my needs?
Thank you
Gary
This is all coming up because the people who manage our VOIP phone (mitel) systems are blaming everything on the network and are avoiding doing any work on their system until the switches are updated. (Honestly, I agree that the switches should be updated... we're currently using a rag-tag collection of left-over "dumb" switches that require prayer and that we sacrifice a virgin lamb before each reboot.)
What we need is a 24 port POE "semi managed" switch (POE on all 24 ports for VOIP phones with a total of around 160watts power budget) and a 48 port non-POE semi managed switch. Both should be gigabit switches. (Having one POE and one non-POE switch is to reduce the cost.)
By "semi-managed", I mean that the switches should have some managed features, but don't need to be full blown L3 routing capable switches that sing, dance, and wash dishes. They need to support VLAN's (both 802.1q tagged and port-based VLANs), spanning tree (to make the phone people happy because they insist that STP is a magic bullet that'll fix all the world's problems even if there's no loops), LACP, and perhaps some type of mechanism for dealing with packet storms. (Netgear calls it "storm control")
We'd like the two switches to be from the same manufacturer in order to avoid any incompatibilities.
The only other requirement I'd have for the switches would be that they are rated to handle the amount of traffic that they have ports for. They are rare these days, but I still on occassion see switches that will choke on full loads of traffic.
The boss wants NEW (not used) switches. The phone people suggested 2x 48 port POE HP Aruba switches that they'd be happy to sell us. We don't need that, and really don't want to spend $3k (USD) on them. I suggested a pair of netgear switches (GS748T and GS728TP-100NAS) based on me being familiar with Netgear's "semi managed" line of routers. That kind of covers the top and bottom ends of the budget.
Can anyone please suggest other pairs that would meet my needs?
Thank you
Gary