I have a feeling that when it comes to enterprise-level routing and switching that Cisco is held in pretty high regard. But if you were going to put a 24 or possibly a 48 port 10/100 switch with a couple of GBit copper uplinks in a new office, would you shell out what is looking like £800 for a Cisco device or would you just grab a 3Com or Netgear offering for a third of the price?

I suppose it depends which Cisco features you're depending on. Here, the sysadms have been slowly but surely replacing older, cheaper switches with Cisco boxes that they can remotely manage. However, when I needed a 24-port GigE switch for a new cluster, the "managed" NetGear was an order of magnitude cheaper than the Cisco, so I got the NetGear.

Part of the issue is I'm looking for some places to save money, there are bits of the system I can't get cheaper models of (read complicated broadcast kit manufactured by one company) so something has to give somewhere. The network itself is really simple. 50-odd workstations with normal office-type applications and a handful of high performance video server type things.

SInce your network is relatively small, it makes sense to go with simpler, cheaper gear. You can always get something fancier later on if/when you decide you need it. The high performance video servers may want to be on their own smaller GigE switch, while the rest of the office might be perfectly happy on a bigger 100Mbit switch.

The current plan is recycle a managed GigE switch (which is actually a Netgear one, a 24 port Cisco GigE is incredibly expensive) for the 'core' but there seems to be a habit in the company of buying the cheapest Cisco 24 port switch available for office machines. It doesn't seem to make any sense since the office machines are probably the least important ones, the channel certainly won't drop off the air if they can't read their email!

My company uses a lot of the 3Com hubs, routers and switches because they are cheaper and is starting to go with more Cisco installs now due to a high rate of failure on the 3Com's. I haven't had very many of the Cisco devices in my area long enough to give an opinion yet but you usually get what you pay for

CIscos are very stable, but what you're paying for more is advanced features. It sounds like you probably don't need things like SNMP access, AAA, NTP, IGMP support, trunking, advanced STP, the ability to force speed/duplex on ports, or 802.11Q VLANs. You may not even need any sort of managability at all, but just plug-in and go.

One cheap way you can get redundancy is if your video servers have dual Ethernet ports. Then, you can run the 'A' ports to the 'A' switch and the 'B' ports to the 'B' switch. Sure, you have to buy twice as many switches, but you get rid of a single point of failure.

Cisco, BLEH.. hate the stuff myself. Most places that don't have a bunch of CCNAs around go with HP or netgear. I've played with a couple dell switches (re-braned something or other) they're stable enough, but I've heard about problems from some people.. maybe they just don't remember to save running config to stored config.

Also.. gige is cheap enough these days to just skip 10/100 ports.