Network Upgrade (About Time)

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jonnygrim

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Sep 4, 2013
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Hi,

Hope someone can point me in the correct direction. Ive finally convinced my peers that I need to have a network overhaul as the current system we have is years old. So...
I contacted my usual suppliers to ask what the best type of switches to purchase are and each supplier recommends differently, obviously whoever they partner with the most. Ive trawled the web and there is loads of mixed answers and im no better off from where i started so thought I would see what you all think on here.

Im after any model POE gigabit switches, 1 or 2 sfp fibre link port minimum. Something thats easily manageable and unfortunately as part of my agreement with the upgrade I have to keep costs as low as possible.

I plan to get 5x48 ports and 2x 24 ports. Your recommendations would be greatly received.

Thanks in advance.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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The problem with PoE is you must know how much total power you plan to draw from each device. In many cases the switch cannot power all the port or it can power the ports at say only 7 watts or half the ports at 15watts. You will also find that many of the switches that actually can power say 48 ports at the same time have large power requirements themselves. Sometime you must run 2 power supplies on different circuits or have 220 power.

Then you have to consider the distribution of the switches. You will likely need a larger central switch that has many more fiber ports. If you are going to actually be using a lot of traffic between the switch you may need to consider 10g uplinks and a central swith that can run many 10g modules. Then again if a number of switches are located in the same location the stacking options some device have may reduce the need for as much uplink capacity.

It is also going to matter if you need to do routing on the switch or even need vlans.

The actual brands do not mean a lot if you have very simplistic needs. Once you need advanced features that is when you start going to the larger brands like cisco or HP or any number of others.
 
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jonnygrim

Honorable
Sep 4, 2013
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Wow, thanks for your response but now im even more confused. If i said I was looking to run an avayer ip telephony system off the same switches and possibly run the wifi network through them too. As for traffic, i cant imagine there will be much. We dont handle massive files and alot of the work we do is browsing the web.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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You might be able to get by with the cheaper brands like tp-link. Again you need to go figure out how much power each device is going to request. Many phones only want 7.5 watts but AP generally want 15 watts then again some of the fancy cisco phones use 15 watts. The switch you choose must have a PoE power budget large enough to supply this so you must read all the fine print when choosing.

Another thing to consider is if you plan to share the port between the phone and the PC. One of they key advantages to VoIP phones is you can plug the phone into the switch and the PC into the back of the phone. This greatly reduces you port count in your switches. In the simplest configuration this just works like a dumb switch. BUT many phones have the ability to take advantage of vlan tagging to keep the voice network and the data network separate. Many of the phones also have the ability to run QoS to mark the voice traffic. Basic support of vlans taggings is supported by most PoE switches but if you want this more automated you will need to see which switches phones are compatible with. Many of the advanced phones and switches you can just take a blank phone plug it into a network and they will negotiate all the vlan numbers and ip addresses. Makes it very nice when users move from desk to desk in a large company.
 
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choucove

choucove

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May 13, 2011
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Even small traffic can be quickly compiled to a large demand for bandwidth depending on the number of concurrent connections. For example, if you've got 100 clients accessing to a local domain controller for small word documents, AND accessing websites for content, AND making phone calls through your IP network, etc. then it can really start to add up. This is why quality network equipment with management features is a must for a network this size. You may be needing to segment your network with VLANs (especially if you're also doing VoIP) plus running quality of service. There's probably also a need for access control and denial (either at the switch level or at the firewall or router) as well as possibly network traffic monitoring for quality purposes.

As bill001g said, it's really more about the features than the brand name once you start looking at the higher end equipment like this. He's got some very great information for you here, but the main thing that's going to end up costing you the most is getting high-density PoE switches.
 
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