Switch Advice - Small Business

DirtySouth

Anyone have any suggestions for a 24 port switch. Needs to have 100 Mbps ports with at least a couple 1 Gbps ports. This is for my Dad's office. Right now they're using a hub. It will be used strictly for interconnecting approximately 10 PC's, 1 server and a couple printers. We'd like to keep the price under $500.

Hopefully this is not too vague, let me know if anyone needs more details.

Slowhand

You should be okay with going to a place like Fry's or CompUSA and picking up a Netgear or Linksys switch. Both those companies make switches with anywhere from 4 - 100 ports, and you can get them in both 100Mbps and 1000Mbps. I'm not sure on pricing, but you can check the websites of the various retailers.

DirtySouth

Was wondering if there would be any real benefit in spending the big bucks on a Cisco managed switch or would one of these "non-managed" switches do just fine. This is for a relatively small business so I'm thinking nay.

malcybood

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1032944

something like this?

malcybood

DirtySouth wrote:

Was wondering if there would be any real benefit in spending the big bucks on a Cisco managed switch or would one of these "non-managed" switches do just fine. This is for a relatively small business so I'm thinking nay.

If you buy a managed switch you have to either dedicate resources to manage it or pay someone to manage it.

I would say for a small office such as this a managed router is justified but not bother with the switches being managed. I'd put the netgear switch in to accomodate the workstations printers and server.

If the business grows significantly then I would possibly consider putting a cisco or a Nortel switch stack in. Depends on budget and what the users are doing/network restrictions/bandwidth required etc...I reckon for 10 users the only setting you would possibly even change on a cisco switch is the logon/ena username/passwords and the duplex speed of the server port.

Other than that you have a fancy expensive Cisco doing the job of a $200 netgear. Also remember to use cat 5e or cat 6 cable to connect the 1GBPS devices to the switch. Cat 5 only supports fastethernet 100mbps.