Sunday, March 14, 2004

Managed vs Unmanaged Network Switches

We're getting ready to upgrade the central hub at work to gigabit ethernet and I'm trying to decide if a small network like ours really needs to use managed switches or if we can continue to use unmanaged. The current topology is pretty poor, with multiple 10/100 hubs connected in daisy-chain fashion. (A to B to C to D to E) The first step in the new topology is to put a central gigabit switch in (24 port) and star-topology the existing 10/100 hubs off of it. (A to X, B to X, C to X, D to X, E to X - where 'X' is the new gigabit switch). In addition, we're going to put gigabit cards in all of the servers and connect them to the central gigabit switch as well. So it would probably behoove us to put a high quality switch in that important central position.

Links:
Firewall.cx Forums - Managed vs Unmanaged
A-B Journal Apr 2003 - The Ethernet Dashboard
LANTronix Network Switching Tutorial
Ethernet Tutorial - Network Switching
wireless-chat.net - Managed or Unmanaged Switches?
Network Computing - Designing and Building the Best Small Office Network From the Ground Up

Possible products:
3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4924 ($4050 at CDW)
3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 3824 24-port managed Gigabit ($1900 at CDW)

We'll probably go with the less expensive 3824 switch, and if that doesn't do the job we can always farm it out to one of the leaf segments and purchase a 4924 instead.

posted by Wuphon's at 11:21 AM