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Managed and unmanaged switches

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by trtjj

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I am building out a new infrastructure at a new location. Construction will start in 2-3 months. Currently we are in a 120 year old building with bad cabling and about 10 3Com Superstack 3 unmanaged switches. They had major networking issues due to spanning tree. I changed the configuration to a Star config. Since we will be here for at least 6 months, do you think it is wise to move all 10 servers onto a managed switch.

Thanks,
Tom

3 replies

by why me worry?

or as you put it, the hub and spoke layout, but if your superiors don't want to spend the money to install at the least CAT 5 twisted pair cabling and invest in high end managed switches, then they should not bitch about excessive
network collisions and crappy network performance

6 months may seem like such a short time and the idea of cutting corners by going the cheap route may be tempting, but think of how much money will will be lost in the long run if people cannot do their jobs due to crappy network performance?

by jbaker

I agree with Rzan. Go ahead and spend the little bit of extra money to get the managed hardware, and in the future you will not need to throw good money after bad and upgrade the switches. Plus, if you can get them to go for it, go ahead and install Cat 6 cable instead of Cat5e. That will enable you to extend the life of the network even further.

by roland.penton

It always amazes me how management will be so shorted sighted when it comes the network hardware.

The network hardware layer is a critical component to the reliability of your workstations and applications!

Believe me I've been there.

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