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We're moving to a new office and we will be needing to setup a network closet. I'm estimating that we will have around 140 ethernet ports and will be using CAT6a cabling for 1Gbps connections.

I'm wondering if there is a recommended switch that we should be getting? Should we be using L2 managed switches? L2 stackable switches? And what's with "Smart" switches?

I'm also thinking that for the SIP phones, they should be connected to a different switch. Am I correct in separating it?

The plan is for the switches to be connected to an uplink device, which is either a L3 switch or security appliance (firewall).

Appreciate the help.

Thanks.

HopelessN00b
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dukz
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  • `I'm wondering if there is a recommended switch that we should be getting? ` - Yes there is. Get the one that fits your needs. Also, this question is off topic. – joeqwerty Oct 29 '14 at 15:29
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    You should really hire a professional for this. It wouldn't be a lot of money to get a good consultant to make the proper design recommendations - which you need more than a simple product recommendation (which we don't do.) – mfinni Oct 29 '14 at 15:29
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    You should get a switch with at least 140 ports on it. – HopelessN00b Oct 29 '14 at 15:38
  • Managed switches are the obvious choice. You don't want 140 links with dumb switches. – Nathan C Oct 29 '14 at 15:41
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    One of these, you don't want to turn it all off by mistake! http://www.lesliewong.us/images/1201/cover.jpg – JamesRyan Oct 29 '14 at 15:54
  • See: http://serverfault.com/questions/2219/what-should-i-pay-attention-to-when-im-buying-a-network-switch – Zoredache Oct 29 '14 at 17:20

1 Answers1

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To keep this on-topic, and not make this opinion-based I'll just speak to the technologies you mention in your question.

re: managed versus unmanaged

An unmanaged switch gives you no functionality to monitor the switch. You can't see packets sent / received, error counts, etc. They're just a "black box" that moves packets. Typically you don't get virtual LAN (VLAN) functionality.

A managed switch is going to give you visibility into the amounts of traffic flowing, and typically will allow you to view the MAC adjacency tables, and to use protocols like Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP), Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), etc.

I don't know what a "Smart" switch is. Can you provide an example?

Many people would say that, at 140+ clients, an unmanaged switch doesn't give you enough visibility to troubleshoot problems. I'd be really, really wary of using unmanaged switches in such an environment.

re: stacking

Stackable switches have dedicated ports to allow higher-speed connectivity to other switches than the non-stacking ports will allow. Connecting switches together via a single non-stacking port can create a bottleneck. Will it create one in your scenario? It depends.

You could also aggregate multiple ports between switches as an alternative to using a stackable switch. You can think about aggregated links similarly to stacking, from a bandwidth perspective. (Though, obviously, you'll be using ports for interconnection in an link aggregation scenario that you wouldn't be using in a stackable switch scenario.)

With 140 client computers you probably won't be connecting all the clients to the same switch to which servers they might be accessing will be connected (since you'll likely be using switches that max-out at 48 ports). The clients connected to the same switch as the servers will have higher-speed access to those servers than the other clients. Using a stackable switch (or aggregation) would give more bandwidth to those clients attached to switches other than the one to which the servers are connected.

Making a call on stackable versus non-stackable is a harder call to make. If you don't have on premise servers, for example, and all the clients will be talking out the "uplink" port anyway, then you probably won't see any bandwidth contention like I described above in a non-stackable scenario.

re: separating the phones

If the phones need Power over Ethernet (PoE) and the desktop clients don't then getting a separate smaller-port-count PoE switch for the phones probably makes sense. There's no sense in buying more PoE ports than you need, given that PoE ports have a cost premium over non-PoE ports.

If you're not using PoE then it's not likely that you'll see any particular benefit from going with a separate switch for the phones, so long as the switches support segregating the phones into a separate VLAN (which is a best practice with nearly every voice over IP (VoIP) system out there).

Community
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Evan Anderson
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    The "smart" moniker is usually applied to switches that fall somewhere between fully unmanaged switches and enterprise-class managed ones in terms of features and capabilities. In some respects, they're just bigger, rackmount versions of the SoHo models often sold in big-box stores. – James Sneeringer Oct 29 '14 at 16:55