On Tuesday 24 August 2010 11:41:20 J Georgius wrote:
> Well I'll have a looksy at Dell and thanks for the input, I do like the
> DPDT and paper clip idea, but i'm not very good at high frequency design
> yet.
> 
> JG

There's a pretty big jump in gigE switches, with a very confusing middle 
ground.

Essentially you have gigE switches designed for home use, where you have 
several computers all linking at gigE, no VLANs, no STP, and fairly rare 
bursts of high traffic between two hosts.

Then you have gigE switches designed for full wirespeed N-way gigE and the 
capability to process VLAN tags and STP on every port.  If that comes to you 
in a blue box with cisco painted on the side you can expect them to be several 
thousand dollars.  If you go with an alternative supplier, you will still 
spend 4 figures, but it will be closer to a grand.  Our core switches at work 
are Foundry FESX448+2XG's, after the 10gig fiber modules to link them I think 
they were $1900 each.

The confusing middle ground is when some features are added to a $100 home 
gigE switch, the price gets into the $300 range, and you have VLAN capability, 
STP, a web gui management interface, maybe a serial port and CLI.  Netgear, 
Dell, SMC, dlink and many others make these switches.  Some people have good 
luck with them, some don't.  A lot of it breaks down to usage.  They don't 
have enough processor to process 12 ports doing wirespeed gigE with STP and 
VLAN tagging, if you try to make them do that, they'll tip over.  They can 
also tip over because it's a $300 Dlink and that's just what you get.

Moral of the story, you get what you paid for.  I've had remarkably good luck 
on occasion, but recognize that it's just that, luck.

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel
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