Advice needed on quietest 24 port POE Gigabit Switch

[phillbot]

Hi, I know this has been addressed before but some of the threads are quite old.

I need to find a quiet switch that runs POE and preferably gigabit. I am hunting it down for a small hotel setup containing:

9 POE VOIP Phones
4 POE Wifi hubs

Some Sonos, PCs, VOIP server, Printers etc.

if I count everything up it is actually 25 ports but I think I will have no option to spin off an extra 8 port non-POE in the office for all the PC's and stuff as there is likely no quiet 48 port POE solution around.

The switch will be in the office - does anyone know of a reliable switch model that is as quiet as possible - if not fanless?

I had a go at the Netgear GS748TP but that was like a roaring vacuum cleaner. At this point the sound level is more important than the budget

Any help much appreciated

 

[bill001g]

I suspect you are going to be looking for a while. Almost all the switches I have seen that have 24 or more ports and PoE come in loud and very loud models.

If you can get by with 10/100 ports cisco sells 2960C-12PC-L. This box has 12 10/100 and 2x1g. All 12 10/100 ports are PoE but the power budget for PoE ports is only 124 watts. If your devices average less than 10watts you could use all the ports. They also sell
3560CG-8PC-S This is a 8 port gig switch with the same 124 watt power budget but it is also layer 3 so it add more costs.

These are designed for conference rooms and have no fans so are silent.

I guess you could look for power injectors external. Most the issue is trying to cram so much power in such a small box.

 

[phillbot]

thanks for the info. Gives me some new places to look. If i were to get one of the 12 port ones I guess I could plug the other phone in the wall (in the office) so could use up all the ports.

Being a slight novice at this. How easy is it to chain it to a second switch if i would also be attempting to use Vlan to create a guest network and also segregate the VOIP phones, but all of them still be able to access the internet?

For the fact it is not gigabit, I only intend this to be used for the VOIP lines, internet browsing by guests, music streaming and some office work. Is a Gigabit switch overkill? - i notice the Grandstream Phone i was experimenting with is only 10/100 anyway

 

[bill001g]

These are cisco enterprise switches. They likely have more options than you use. They support things like plugging a pc into the back of IP phone and having it negotiate different vlans and QoS settings all by itself so the PC and phone share a cable. It can do some basic filtering of data but the 2960 do not do routing, you could run a 802.1q trunk up to the internet router and let it route between the vlans.
Otherwise you go with a 3560 which can do most routing...no nat though. They sell a 3560 with 12 ports but that one like the 2960 only runs 10/100. Not sure why they don't sell the 8 port 2960 with gig

Cabling them together you can just use the 2 gig copper prots. By default cisco runs ports as trunk ports and carries all vlans across. So you could pretty much just plug in the cables and it will work.

The downside to these switches is they have many options so it will take a while to be good with them.

Both these switches are the same software wise as their big brothers that don't have the "C" in the name. Those all have very loud fans in them though.

Most people that use gig want to stream high def video or run data storage networks. For internet you are limited by how much internet you paid for.