Switches- major brand or?

If you are not concerned about downtime if the switch fails, then a cheaper one is fine (you may be able to buy two cheaper ones rather than one expensive one and swap one out if it fails). Most of the benefit of Intel, cisco, or 3Com come with a more robust tech support policy. The cheaper ones don't so, evaluate the cost in downtime if the switch fails.

If your network will be getting larger in the future (and most do!) then the cheaper unmanaged switch can then be relegated to some non-backbone use and you can get a more robust one in the future.

Hope that helps,

I think that it depends on your finances at the current state. Also, I think that you would have to consider what your needs are going to be in the future. If necessary in the future will it be a part of your backbone, depending on the growth, orwill it become a paper weight? And whether or not the troubleshooting headaches that an unmanged switch can bring.

I personally would recommend going with a mamaged switch, if possible. It makes life easier when users start complaining that the network is slow, and you can show them the utilization is very low, or packets are being passed with no problem. It just gives you that added tool for solving your network problem, and you won't be there all night trying to find the problem.

Quite often, the products are not really comparable and the price difference is largely justified by the performance. The critical performance measure for a switch is the backplane capability and you'll typically find a substantial difference in backplane speed between the low-end and the high-end switches.

Also, at the high end, you'll generally find that the switches allow the switch fabric to extend to other switches, thus maintaining full network speed at all ports on all switches, where the low-end switches have to be linked using the uplink port so ports on the downstream switch only receive a fraction of the bandwidth of the upstream switch.

With that in mind, if a particular office will not grow to more than 24 users, is notusing videoconferencing, CADD or other high bandwidth applications, and has limited funds available, I'll recommend a low-end switch.

Conversely, if there will be growth beyond 24 ports in that office and there will be use of high-bandwidth applications, I strongly recommend a high-end switch.

Other than one case where a site was directly struck by lightning, I haven't seen an operating switch failure (as opposed to an "out of box" failure) with either high-end or low-end switches.

paul