ask advise for a switch

[MvL]

Hi,

 

My servers are located in the basement. I have a switch in the basement and one in the house. I want to connect these two switches with two CAT6A cables ( link aggregation). From the switches to the outlet is also CAT6A cabling. I'm thinking of using gigabit switches (10Gb switches are to expensive). I need a 8 ports and 12 ports switch. Can you advise me a switch?

[shat]

MvL, you definitely do not need 10gbps of throughout for your house. I have a 10gig-e mesh fabric switch I use at the distribution side of my corporate network with 400 servers.

 

Monoprice has cheap switches 8-24 port for cheap. I use one of their gb switches at home for all of my media devices. They're auto uplink so you can just connect a cable in between two of them to icrease distribution/ports.

[dikkiedirk]

I use these 2, and I am very happy with them:

 

http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B001QUA6RA/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00

 

http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B002N5C7UG/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i00

 

Both brands also offer other sizes, that might better suit you.

 

[MvL]

Thanks for the input!

 

So i'm concentrating me on gigabit switches. I did some googling and found the ProCurve 1810 switches. Dikkiedirk is also recommend the HP 1810.., cool. So i'm thinking of buying the 8 port and 24 port version (there is no 16 port version). Lucky they are silent (they have no fan) and power efficient. The switches have a price of 75 euros for the 8 ports version and 195 euros for 24 ports version.

 

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA2-6799ENW.pdf

 

Whats your opinion?

[Frank1940]

Suggestion for your consideration.  If you are looking for the high throughput, consider using more switches rather than a few large switches.  The bottle neck will be the total capacity of the cables used to interconnect the switches.  Example: two switches, one cable- max speed-- 1Gb/s.  Three switches, two cables- max speed-- 2Gb/s. 

 

By careful setup and assignment of computers (and other devices) to the switches, you can set things up so that data 'starving' is almost non-existent.  Plus, smaller switches are cheaper than large ones.  Your setup objective should be to group devices so that most of the high speed traffic will be within the same switch.  In my setup, I have a 8 port and  a 16 port Gb switches.  All of the Gb devices are on the 16 port switch and the second 8 port has only 100 mb/s devices

[MvL]

Thanks Frank1940 for your reply!

 

The modem and servers are located in the basement also there is the 8 ports switch to connect the servers from there two connections to the house to the 24 ports switch then i'll go to all devices. I thought two cables to the 8 ports switch give me 2Gb/s better as one cable 1Gb/s. The cables are Cat6a so they are certified for 10Gb/s but switches supporting 10Gb/s are to expensive. I have no option for more cable to the house. I have a basement and the house is on the first and second floor. I'll hope my explanation is clear.

[Frank1940]

I would be a little worried that the inexpensive switches may not properly handle two uplink ports to another switch on the other end.  You may find that you will only have a single uplink connection to other switch. 

[MvL]

The switches are supporting link aggregation. See the link i posted.

 

• Link aggregation (trunking)

brings together groups of ports automatically using Link

Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) or, manually, to form an

ultra-high-bandwidth connection to the network backbone; helps

prevent traffic bottlenecks; the 8-port Gigabit Ethernet models have

four trunks of four links each, the 24-port Gigabit Ethernet models

have eight trunks of four links each, and the 1810-48G switch has

16 trunks of eight links each

[Chris Pollard]

Yeah LACP / 802.3ad is required for link aggregation.  Connecting two switches without that is officially a Bad Thing^TM (especially if they are cheap junk and don't have any kind of loop protection). 

 

HP Procurve seem to be a popular choice,  I've played with them briefly and they seem OK.  Also have a few Netgear ProSafe Switches at work which seem well built but the configuration interface is a bit odd,  especially the trunking config....  I work with Cisco so maybe I'm just too used to their stuff

[DoeBoye]

+1 for Procurve! Have had 2 connected for a few years without issue.

 

[EDIT] Apologies! I did not read your post properly. Assumed you were looking to combine multiple smaller switches to increase total available ports. Did not clue in that your concern was with increasing total bandwidth. I am NOT using link aggregation (not sure if my procurve switches even support it as they are the 1410 unmanaged models), but simply have them daisy-chained together to provide 14 ports.[/EDIT]

[Johnm]

In general, running 2 cables between 2 switches that do not support link aggregation and have not been configured for it, with cause a loopback and take down the segment/Vlan.

 

Keep in mind that single workstation to server will still not use much more then a full GB of throughput when it has the ability.

 

Even SSD to SSD over 1GB is about capped. the real benefit is so that a single workstation is not eating 100% of the bandwith (ignoring QoS for a sec) in large file transfers.

[MvL]

Hi, thanks for the reply's! Good to read positive things about the Procurve line of HP.