On 2017-06-02 12:38, Theodore Baschak wrote:

Based on the prices of new items that meet your needs,

I'd almost recommend buying a Cisco Catalyst 3560-48TS -- 48+ gigabit ports (48+SFPs). I picked up one for around $200 shipped for my birthday in late 2016.

I also picked up an HP Procurve 2910al-48 for around the same price, its also got 48 gigabit ports + some SFPs, SNMP, CLI, etc.

 

The only drawback on the HP stuff is the spanning-tree on the Procurve is pretty funky when you enable it (its not enabled by default), I would recommend against mixing these with other vendors.

HP's spanning-tree implementation works perfectly fine.  What they fail at is making it obvious which STP variant you're running, which is (IIRC) 802.1w by default, *not* 802.1d.  Which then interoperates poorly with 802.1d switches, since HP's implementation of 802.1w's backward-compatibility mode employs different timers (again IIRC) than most others.  This is not wrong, they're within the standard, but ... 

...yeah, ok, funky was a good word in the first place :-/

Beware the HP-branded gear that started out life as 3Com instead of HP; it's awful.  Horrible.  Terrible.  My thesaurus is inadequate for this task.  The lower-end Procurve switches are all most Procurve-lineage devices, and while they certainly have quirks (VLAN handling would have been my #1 pick) they're solid.  Better hardware than the Cisco, in my experience (fewer port failures).

-Adam

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