Cisco small business switches, SRW2048

[robmurphy]

Anyone have any particularly bad experience with this switch?

I have been asked to recommend some more switches. At present were are using a couple of unmanaged Netgear Gigabit switches but are running out of ports.

Were are expanding the network and need some more switches. We could get more of the unmanaged switches but need over 40 ports.

I want to use Gigabit to connect the PCs too, rather than 100 Mbs.

The switches will be used for data only. The switches do not need to be remotely managed. I looked at the specs and the switches have Jumbo frames, STP, and can port mirror (that's a definite requirement). We will not be using POE.

I think the Cisco Catalyst 48 port Gigabit switches would be considerably more expensive. The Dell ones are as much or more, the Netgear basic managed ones are more. I'm not clear about the HP pro curve in this size.

Having used the support from Cisco small business, Netgear, and Dell I know I would rather use the Cisco small business support.

Are there any major problems with these switches I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance

Rob.

 

[mxnerd]

Some bad reviews

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...55&Tpk=SRW2048

 

[drebo]

I wish they hadn't started calling this crap "Cisco Small Business". It's Linksys. It always has been and always will be.

If you want good stability and longevity, spend the money on a ProCurve or a Catalyst. If you want to skimp, keep buying the Netgears you have because you know that they work and are comfortable with them.

 

[Emulex]

procurve is the lowest tier that any networking professional will stand behind. and i'll be honest - i do not feel all of their low end products should carry the procurve - but the midline gear (2510G) and up is very nice indeed.

now that hp has 3com - they can make a low-end and super-high end (you know in asia 3com owns in core/super high end route/switch) - i'm not even sure if many people know 3com had an elite brand. it's not under 3com iirc

 

[robmurphy]

I'm not happy with the present switches used for the data network. We have the netgear prosafe 8 port and 16 port switches at present. We are running out of ports, that is the main reason to expand the network.

To use 3 of the 16 port prosafes would cost only a little less than the linksys switch. The managed Netgear work out as much or more than the Linksys.

Again as said in the firewall thread I posted I'm out of my depth. The facts remain that recently I have had dealings with Dell, Netgear, and Cisco small business. Call it Linksys fine but the support in the UK is stated as from Cisco, and the Linksys support is from a different phone number. The support from Cisco small business was much much better than Netgear or Dell.

I do not know what support I would get from D link ect.

I may be able to justify the Procurve 2510G-48, on the basis of a lifetime warranty, but if possible I would prefer some real user experience of the Linksys and the Procurve.

The Cisco catalyst range for 48 ports of Gigabit is much much more. I could not recommend that level of expense without some real facts to back it up. As stated before the switch ports are to connect the user's data network. The voice network does use Cisco Catalyst at present (48 port 2960). Gigabit is completely wasted on the voice network. The data and the voice are completely separate.

The data network does need to be at Gigabit. If the user does loose conectivity it takes out 1 user. There are only a few shared resources. If these work OK with the prosafe netgear is the switch I mentioned going to be so much less reliable the the netgear prosafe?

The switch mentioned is not used to connect even 1 mission critical resource.

As also stated the switches do not need remote management. They do however need port mirroring. The port mirroring is only likely to be for a few days at a time, and again not business critical.

Given what has been said could anyone give some real experience of the SRW2048, or a justification for the extra expense needed for 48 Gigabit port Cisco Catalyst switch.

I'm not after a switch with 44 to 48 100 meg fast ethernet ports and 2 - 4 gigabit ports. The switch will need all 48 ports to be gigabit ethernet.

Rob.

 

[Emulex]

i run everything off a 2510G-48 right now (small business) since i wanted gigabit across the board - mixing gigabit and 100 is not ideal.

i also have non production iscsi /nfs running over this switch as well. doesn't break a sweat. solid. as expected 100% uptime.

honestly until you move up to the high power procurve line 2910al - the difference in the series is mostly features - the packet buffer and packet rate is about the same.

Highly recommend the 2510G-48 - i've got a couple of 1810G-24 but since they do not support STP i would only use them as edge switches or isolated network switches.

At about this time at night about 40 machines start doing backups so the switch really gets a workout - i have several long haul wires running at 100meters to backup servers located in another data closet for physical security - no problems.

like all server products i get instant support - problem? next day air of another product (with no smartnet etc) - good support - firmware update proactive notifications.

Best advice - keep your old switch if you can't afford to have a cold/hot spare.

Linksys is not cisco - it is a toy brand or consumer brand no matter how you look at it.

Switches should never crash - they should never lock up - and ports should not go bad - i've had two switches in my life die - both 3com - at which time i chucked all 3com and went all hp.

But since 3com-hp is about to go live so soon its not funny (which includes the super high end H3C) - you will have more choice from hp to fill the gaps.

2824-2620-2510g, 1810G-24. right now until the move (to voip) i have no real reason to use anything but the 2510G-48.

Remember more hardware = more power = more power sockets - with 10GBE coming into play i'd pick the 2510G-48 - its a solid choice - and when you are ready to spend $3-5K on a nice higher end switch with 10GBE uplinks - do that.

2510g-48 has the same ios-like command line, stupid easy to use web manage and diagnostics, and out of band serial last time i checked.

i had a problem with my 1810G-24 - it had a bad firmware (early model) and i was talking to the american engineers who next day air'd me a new one - and then specially took the old one in to not only figure out the issue but call me back (twice) to explain what the problem was and how to prevent it if any such old stock got in my hands again. they assured me any new stock would not have the firmware level I got. The amount of time and money they spent handling the 1810G-24 cost more than the switch itself lol.

 

[Mogadon]

I rolled into a place that had a bunch of the 8 and 24 port versions running these facility wide, at that time some of these switches were being rebooted daily as they were causing all sort's of issues (network resources unavailable to various workstations, intermittent/no internet access etc). Replaced them with a bunch of equivalent catalyst series switches and haven't had any issues since. Made a lot of unhappy people happy.

 

[spidey07]

I rolled into a place that had a bunch of the 8 and 24 port versions running these facility wide, at that time some of these switches were being rebooted daily as they were causing all sort's of issues (network resources unavailable to various workstations, intermittent/no internet access etc). Replaced them with a bunch of equivalent catalyst series switches and haven't had any issues since. Made a lot of unhappy people happy.

That almost sounds like a bridge loop or bug. Not surprised. SOHO switches just act like SOHO switches. As said rebooting a "real" switch just doesn't happen and if you need to, something is very, very wrong and one should probably try to figure out the root cause of why it needed to be reboot.

They're not PCs. They are not supposed to be reset to solve a problem, the problem should be identified first and only then as a last ditch effort should a reboot be required. Not to mention all the redundancy features.

 

[robmurphy]

We may still go with a Linksys, or netgear ect. At present one of the staff is getting prices on the HP Procurve 2510G - 48. As this has lifetime support this will probably be the one we will get.

I'm still unsure about the SRW2048. Apart from occasional port mirroring it would have been a fairly dumb L2 switch. A present these are provided by 2 Netgear switches the GS108 and the GS116. The price for 3 of the GS116 is not much less than the SRW2048. There is no interworking of the SRW2048s planned, just connection of the desktop and laptop PCs. A linux PC providing samba may have been added.

I also remember recommending a small rack mountable linksys 100 Meg L2 switch about 2.5 years back. That worked fine in its initial job, and was later used in another job and was still running fine well over 2.5 years after it was purchased. It never crashed, failed or caused any other problems. It just worked.

Having recently dealt with cisco small business, netgear, and dell support in the UK I know I do not want to deal with dell or netgear ever again. The support from Cisco small business was quick, and the guy knew what he was talking about, and the problem I had was sorted quickly. Dell and netgear support have not got a clue technically between them.

There was no way we could justify spending the money on a full Cisco 48 port Gigabit switch. For a single switch on a non business critical network I think that's overkill.

I can appreciate in large networks of thousands of users using several different layers of switching and with many edge switches providing multiple services to the PCs that Cisco make sense. For a stand alone network allowing the PCs to access network printers, a router to the internet, and possibly a NAS device (linux PC) I still think its overkill.

Just my 2p worth.

Rob

 

[spidey07]

For something small like that it's a good idea to keep a spare handy for quick resolution. Heck even in huge networks you stock your own spares. Saves on having 4 hour replacement maintenance. In this day and age it really is unacceptable for a network to be out of service for very long.

 

[robmurphy]

We will still have the 2 netgears at gigabit spare, and a spare 48 100 meg port Cirsco 2960. The 2960 would need its VLAN config removing though.

Basicaly we are moving the comms room and want to have the switches in the new one ready and set up before moving the users over.

Rob.

 

[stlcardinals]

Would you be able to combine your voice and data network? Cisco phones?

 

[robmurphy]

We could combine the voice and data networks, but most of the phones do not have the switch and second ethernet port needed.

Not combining the networks has some advantages. 2 simple networks with basic switches and routers. To combine the voice and data on the same cable, and the same network you rely on the switch and particularly the router prioritising the voice RTP. It also complicates the internet link used. Having separate internet links means the voice link can be on a low contention ratio, and the data one on a normal contended one.

Having separate voice and data links also means there are no problems with how the router prioritises the voice traffic. Its fine having a router that claims it prioritises the voice, but how reliably is it doing it? Lots of the cheaper end of the routers claim they have many features, but often these are poorly implemented, and cause as many problems as they solve

You can still have separate voice and data links with a converged internal network, but for that you need a switch that can deal with VLAN tagged ethernet frames, and use the VLAN tag to pass the frames to the appropriate router.

If you have any problems with the voice service the first thing the provider will want is a "simple" network with no VLANs ect, so you end up replacing it all.

The data network is also gigabit, and reliable gigabit switches that deal with incoming tagged frames are not cheap. The extra bandwidth from gigabit on the data network may well be used sooner rather later.

Rob

 

[Emulex]

cbeyond's cisco IAD does quite a great job. we run the data 100% up and down most of the day and every line you can watch it chunk 64kbps as it goes into use.

if you have 23 lines you'd have two t-1's so there is enough overhead (spare bandwidth) to never have a big fight.

it's not a bad idea to keep the voice and data segment separate as soon as possible - most people that can't afford two physical wires will vlan tag and separate immediately at the edge router to reduce latency.

all it takes is some dummy throwing a port mirror on a 48 port poe switch on to drive the cpu way up or "debug on".

but anyhoo uc520,540,560 work quite well with cbeyond. the need to have them on routable networks is obvious - you want your get your voicemail over lan (imap etc) and route call data to your CRM so you know whose calling , in great detail (ie dynamics CRM or outlook BCM) before you pick up.

anyone compare the prices of say a UC560 against an entry level ISR? or would you need to combine an ASA5505 in the mix somewhere?

cbeyond provides to LAN (one is nat'd, one is not for your static ip's) - given my lack of experience with NAT and SIP i'd assume you'd feed your trunk (UC560) into their router on one of those ports?

sad thing is we did a comparison against an old nortel 4-5 years ago - a nortel CICS versus voip and the sound quality was poorer on any available phone/trunk combo than the old CICS with T-1/PRI emulation on the cbeyond IAD.

Since CICS is a Point to point analog/digital hybrid you just had a ton more bandwidth for voice (think FLAC) until the last moment when it was digitized into a simulated T-1/PRI.

It's not hard to test this quality - fire up a usr v.everything and use a dial-up service. Load up the lan/vlan for voice with a lot of folks - and check your modems up/downstream for an hour. If you can sustain 28.8 upstream consistently you are pretty good. If you have alot of drops or retrains you have issues.

I can have 20 phone lines lit up, ftp at 100% down and ftp at 100% up and sustain and upload on a modem no problem with the cics analog line port.

it's really not a bad way to measure voice quality because everything you can't quantify with your ears is quantified by the modem.

cbeyond charges $1695 for 9000 minutes (1-800,intra,interlata), 3 t-1's [yes includes loop] plus other services if you need them. very high uptime. The 495$ package is one t-1 i would recommend two t-1's since they are bonded you can lose a line-card and not many people would notice (until the bandwidth runs out).

you just pay them - ask for T-1 channelized, T-1 PRI, or SIP, or (Analog) - they handle the rest. your guy aka hire somone fires up a UC520 and programs the small business "converged device" and boom done. The $5 per month inbound fax service is slick too - they lease modem banks to have your faxes emailed to you. $5 - you can push faxes 24x7x365 for that rate.

Given that i'm like 2 miles away from the company and know folks over there - i have somewhere to go if things go awry - in the past 4 years of service - no problemo - two outages - one was a bad line card (but 2nd t-1 kept us up) and one was a internet routing issue at a peering point a few hundred miles away (route loop).

anyone want to trade some switches 🙂 i got a few small POE and some older 10/100 (48) + 2 gigabit [50 total] switches. mostly all 10/100 with gig uplink - too slow for my network i need gigabit all the way since i'm looking at moving to PCOIP or rdp7 thin client