My office is looking to replace the all the edge switches, and we're wondering what to go with. My previous employer was a Cisco shop edge to core and beyond, and while I've never had a problem with their switches, I've also never had a problem with the dell layer 2 switches that cost thousands less. We're looking for 192-300 gigabit ports, and an additional 48 ports of PoE. Dell 48's go for $500 and the PoE would be $900. Cisco 2960's look to be about 3.5k each.

Support for spanning tree protocol is why we're upgrading. Layer 3 routing isn't necessary. Cost isn't actually a big concern if there's a case for spending more money for features we'd use or actual higher quality. Any recommendations?

Matthew

HP switches work well, but are kind of a pain to administer, for a variety of reasons. If you're using IE, there's an online "configurator".

I'd say Cisco or HP. I think some of the Dell's are actually rebadged SMC or HP switches.

Keep away from Netgear managed switches. The only Netgear equipment I'd buy and use are the little metal boxed unmanaged network switches.

Fortunately I'm not using IE, and I'm of no mind to justify their incompetent web development by finding a machine that is. I'm guessing we'd want 2510G's, which are $1,200 each. We'd be fine with spending that much, I'd just like to have something we were getting besides a known name in the switch business.

I'm definitely plotting a wide course around netgear. I'd happily buy a new ReadyNAS, but can't think of another netgear product I'd willingly buy today.

Oh, I missed the "edge" part of your request. You're just looking at stackable stuff, not modular? And your only requirement (beyond stability) is STP? How about 802.1Q VLAN Tagging? And no networking support beyond basic layer 2 switching?

Companies that I know to do solid layer-2 stuff include Cisco, HP, Foundry (now owned by Brocade, apparently), and Extreme. I'd probably also trust stuff from Juniper, but I don't have any personal experience with their switching(-only) products.

[color:yellow]Edit: Oh, and I meant to say that I haven't kept up with pricing in quite a while, so I'm not making any recommendations on that front at all. Those are just who I'd consider to be Tier 1 to Tier 1.5 vendors in that space, based on product quality.[/yellow]

Not all Netgear stuff is utter crap. We bought some Netgear GSM7328S' a couple of years ago when we moved our news room. Once they were configured (which could only be done properly in IE and required a firmware upgrade) we never had a moment's trouble with them.

But if we'd had the money we would've gone for HP.

Never used one of those but the GSM7324 and GSM7312 were useless. The CLI is very IOSish but not so very quirky and the firmware for them was shoddy. SSH is supported in them but you can't use it because it makes the switch unstable and slow. The GSM7324 had some design flaw which seems to randomly kill them as well. We bought 5 and 4 of them had died within 6 months with weird PCI bus errors that cause it to get stuck in a boot loop. The diagnostics on them also completely wipes clean the flash leaving only the bootloader and nothing else like serial numbers or model numbers.

NetGear technical support at least in Europe was actually really good though. Called them up and they were very helpful and quick. We lost a set of the rackmount brackets and they shipped us a spare set with no payment or questions needed.

The L3 non S model switches are actually some OEM design that Netgear bought in and Dell used a similar design for some of their early switches. I can't remember what the original brand was though but the documentation and CLI were identical.

The design of the software is by a company called LVL7 who got bought out by Broadcom a few years back.