Switch – Managed Switches: Smart managed or fully managed

netgearswitch

We (a fast growing SMB) need new switches. Currently, all our switches are unmanaged. Now we need feature of managed switches, mainly features like VLANs, Port Mirroring, SNMP, adjusting the port speed.

Currently, no fiber ports nor stackable switches are needed. Nice to have, but not a must are some PoE-ports for our WLAN accesspoints.

I know, there are three kinde of switches: unmanaged, smart managed and fully managed switches. My problem is to see if a "smart managed" switch is good enough to fit our needs or not. Due to our network equipment is mainly netgear, I searched and found those two netagear switches:

http://www.netgear.co.uk/stackable_smart_switch_gs724ts_gs748ts.php
http://www.netgear.com/products/business/switches/smart-switches/GS724TP.aspx

They are "smart managed". A fully managed one would be this one:

http://www.netgear.co.uk/managed_layer2_switch_gsm7224.php

This one is fare more expensive than the other ones. But I'm unsure if the first two switches are fitting oure needs. Can someone give me a hint?

Best Answer

There is one think in the "smart managed" product description that has me recoiling in horror and considering it "not suited for purpose" and that is the phrase "web console".

Without a mention of a telnet/ssh-based admin interface, there is no sensible way of driving the switch from code and that's a want-have for an SMB (and a must-have for a large company). A pohysical console is also a must-have.

Of course, the "fully managed" doesn't say one way or another, so I can't really get behind that either.

I think, at the end of the day, the thing to do is to purchase one of each (or, ask a suitable local vendor if you can have a loaner of each for a couple of weeks), evaluate them and see which one meets your needs and wants. Once you have that, you can then decide if the trade-off between functionality and price speaks to the cheaper or the more feature-full switch.

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Network Switches – Configure Small Business Network Switches

I can't speak to American pricing, but if there is a HP ProCurve Switch in your price range then you might want to take a look. I've found their products to be keenly priced (in the UK anyway), great performers, and very well supported products with a very good guarantee.

I'm not personally a fan of DLink in general but can't comment on the specific model you are looking at. Regardless of what model you buy in the end you have the right idea with going from a group of 'home' products to a business class switch, but also consider the environment - clean power, well ventilated, decent cabling will all help...

Your proposed setup looks fine to me, I think you'll certainly see an improvement in reliability and throughput by reducing the quantity of switches and improving their quality. Simple is nearly always better.

You do have to consider that any product, no matter how well built, how well recommended, how well cared for can fail occasionally. If an outage is unacceptable, then whatever product you buy then it might be worth trying to find the money for two in case of a problem. Whether or not the risk vs. investment makes sense for you is something only you can decide.

I can say that from running a major business network, just about every make of 'business class' switch I've used has been very reliable - as long as they're not dead on arrival they should last for a very long time. The ProCurve switches have had the best record in this area for me, which is why I like to suggest them to others.

Switch – Trunk fiber ports on switches

You haven't provided any info about the interfaces you're going to use with the fibre link, so I'm guessing that this is 1gbit.

If the switches you're going to use have 1gbit copper interfaces aswell then it's no problem to trunk between them, this is the normal way of connecting switches that have several uplinks.

I need to warn you however - if those core switches only have two fiber slots each then what are you going to do if one of the switches go down? Since you don't have more than 1 link to each building I highly suggest that you either get core switches with enough (sfp) ports to carry all the fiber links, or get more links between the buildings to build a ring topology - like this:

                                  HQN
                                 / | \
                                /  |  \
                               /   |   \
                              /    |    \
                             B1----B2---HQS

(Link between HQ North and Building 2 would actually be optional)

This would ensure that any single link can go down without interrupting the network. The next step would be designing STP etc, but that's out of scope for this question.

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