Switch Recommendations
in Technical
The job is in the market for a new switch, and I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations. It doesn't need to be anything super fancy, this would replace a 16 port Netgear, but it does need to provide metrics to see what's happening.
It's a small company, and the three employees and the twelve servers will be sharing the switch. Not the most ideal setup, but it will work until I get a bigger budget.
Needed specs:
- 24+ 1G+ ports
- SNMP or some way to monitor it and collect metrics.
Nice to have specs:
- LACP
- Port Mirroring
- VLANs
- Jumbo frames
- 10G+ uplinks
- Managed/Smart
Not needed specs:
- L3 routing
- Stacking
- SPF ports
Budget: <$1K (US), preferably
The Dell Networking stuff looks affordable, and it might be better since Dell bought Force10. I'm also not afraid of a baremetal, if anyone knows where I can get a baremetal/whitebox switches cheaply. 
Comments
@Clouvider @mikho?
without 10G - easy
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cisco-WS-C3560X-24P-S-24-Port-Gigabit-PoE-Switch-1-Cisco-C3KX-NM-1G-1x-AC-JY/113766084987?epid=83698935&hash=item1a7cfcb17b:g:irsAAOSwYmFc7s7F
Have a look at Mikrotik - more then enough choices for your mentioned requirements at reasonable prices! Bought a 10G solution for a small office and it somehow was "love at first sight".
@Bochi I too loved Mikrotik when I first saw it, but with time affection disappeared. I'm not saying it's bad, but I don't think it's worth it.
I like to also have (MikroTik) RouterOS on my switches (in addition to routers and avcess points). Not particularly fond of their SwOS.
I think their swotches have competitive pricing. Just got a new PoE switch, but haven't tried it yet.
Mikrotik just (or soon) is launching a 24/48 port switch which seems to be looking interesting,
https://www.servethehome.com/new-mikrotik-crs-10gbe-and-40gbe-switches-for-2019/
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Do you need it to be new with a support contract? If not, used Dell 5324 is dirt cheap and has everything you list except for 10G uplink. To add 10G uplink, Aruba S2500-24T. There are lots of these sort of EOL managed gigabit switches around as enterprise pulls. The S2500 has two SFP+ ports for uplink and two for stacking, but you can configure all of them as just regular 10Gb ports. It's just one example of a gigabit campus access switch with 10Gb uplink; there are many more like it.
New: Yes
Support Contract: No
It does need to be new equipment, but I don't need a support contract for it, we're not at that level yet.
Yeah, I used some Netgears with 10G uplinks and stacking at a previous place, but those are $1.3K new.
Unifi and EdgeMax 24 and 48 ports switches should tick most of the boxes.
if I may ask, why does it need to be new equipment?
Because it's for a business production network, and not my personal lab. I love refurb equipment as much as the next poster, but that comes with certain tradeoffs I'm not willing to make when I'm getting paid by someone else.
I happily got rid of an Edgerouter a couple months ago. I like Ubiquiti's wireless stuff, but I'm not sold on their other network gear.
Well those trade-offs are what I am asking about. But if this question irritates you, I apologize, I didn't mean to.
If I had requirement for top notch stuff I would go for this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B005MQOB98/ref=olp_page_2?ie=UTF8&f_all=true&startIndex=10
because of:
very little oversubscription, solid sec record.
You can probably pick up a nice Arista switch that'll do pretty much everything you want. If you're familiar with the Cisco CLI, it's nearly identical. We got some nice all SFP+ Arista DCS-7124SX and you can find good deals on eBay.
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It's a valid question. Refurb stuff just isn't an option at this time.
My own stuff sure, but this isn't my stuff.
Oh no! I appreciate the input, and I appreciate your idea! I can be terse at times, and it's not any sort of emotion. It's not happy, sad, angry, or whatever; It just is. I think I was super hyped on caffeine that day too, which probably didn't help my communications.
I really just need something a little bit above the low end. My only real requirement is that it exports metrics in some form or fashion that is machine friendly.
$674.26 for a new EX2200 isn't bad. Do you know if Juniper requires subscriptions to get updates, which is generally the other problem with network gear I'm trying to work around?
I've heard they created a great Cisco clone, and Cisco agrees as well.
Arista looks like a pretty solid option.
I get cranky on this topic too
It's the flashbacks I get from all the discussions I've had on this topic.
People usually argue that ebay equipment is more expensive in the long run with all the maintenance and risk. But I am in a position to had worked in a data center where we tried both new and ebay, and I know hands on "equipment with contract" is sooo overpriced it isn't even funny and ebay is always more efficient. Unless you want the contract or have specific requirements of course.
Updates is a valid con - cost savings do not come out nothing, we were usually able to get them from sellers though.
If they don't they can start doing so at any moment, so there is no reliable answer to that question.
Arista is great, but I was under impression they focus heavily on backbone stuff.
Juniper started as backbone too, but they have great SOHO appliances.
It was when I replaced tplink style router with Juniper SOHO, first time I got an orgasm from network equipment, it was so noticeably faster and steadier.
Ah... you never forget your first...
Enterprise pull equipment can be so cheap. Instead of paying for a support contract with same-day replacement, just buy two or three spares!
(Yes, I know corporate procurement doesn't work like that. But in a SME situation where you can directly make purchasing and support decisions, the cost savings can be tremendous.)
News from the other forum, @cociu's 42k core Juniper switch died after a month plus in service and the entire Hostsolutions is in chaos right now. If you are unlucky, you are are unlucky.
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I pay peanuts so I get...
you mean "in chaos" in chaos?
Someone once said
That is true, we are however switching over some of our customers to fortiswitches instead.
https://www.fortinet.com/content/dam/fortinet/assets/data-sheets/FortiSwitch_Secure_Access_Series.pdf
Edit: I never talk prices with my customers, not sure if these are in the requested price range or not.
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I like how people have run the equipment for a little while. I know it's not going to fail right away, but on the other hand, I won't be able to RMA it if it's a lemon either.
It's also about the person signing the checks, and I don't feel like trying to convince them eBay equipment is fine. That's not a hill to die on.
Possibly. I was really interested in Arista when I worked on a compute cluster, and my opinion of them is based on that.
Ideally, I would get baremetal switches which support a Linux/Unix-like based OS, something like Cumulus, and manage it like the other servers. That's overkill right now though.
That was me with an Linksys RV042, which might still be in production. It was so much nicer then the pile of crap I had at the time. Then I went with an WRT54GL with tomato firmware when APs of the time turned out to be junk, and I never looked back.
I've spent more time on the server, and now dev, side of things, so I'm not as well versed in network equipment as I once was.
Having secondary links is definitely preferably.
In this case, there are bigger single points of failure, like the building, then just the switch, and we have a dumb switch for the backup. There are lots of things I would like to do to make things more robust, and it's just going to take a little bit of time to get there.
That's interesting. It sounds like they're going after Ubiquiti and their Unifi stuff.
If anyone is interested, I went with an FS S3900-24T4S (Fanless 24-Port 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Stackable Managed Switch with 4 10Gb SFP+ Uplinks).
The price and number of fans was correct.
Why not?
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HPE/Ubiquiti are solid options for switching. HPE has a great warranty which has saved me a few times and Ubiquiti is pretty nice from an interface perspective.
If anyone in US/WEST is in the market for an Arista 7148 let me know, we shifted back to all Cisco and I had a few spares.
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I asked Aruba for a quote, but they never got back to me.
The Ubiquiti stuff at a former job would corrupt the MongoDB database every time I touched it, so...
Too many vulns for my liking.
Opinionated design choices. They are present everywhere, but we have different opinions apparently.
Small things like when you add ssh key the password stops working unconditionally. Yeah, I know passwords are less secure, but it has to be my choice when to disable it. And such security pedantry comes from guys with vuln after vuln in management interface.
Did I mention security vulnerabilities?
Their shell is so likable at first, but after Arista where you can just drop in bash...
Again, I am not saying they are completely bad. For just above the cheapest wifi with roaming and compliant authentication I would consider it.
For switches, I have much better stability with Mikrotiks than similarly priced (and more expensive) HPE's. Not to mention NetGear, ZyXEL, TPLink etc.
(Easy to patch, and most security vulnerabilities required you to break default config/open winbox etc to world ...)