Recommendations for 10 gigabit switch?
We're a small office doing media production, and move massive amounts of Terabytes every month.
Several of our new desktop workstations are equipped with 10 gigabit network interfaces, and we have two new servers also capable of 10 gigabit (Synology NAS machines with 10 gigabit interfaces and RAID 10 volumes that can definitely outperform 1 gigabit in both read and write).
What switch would you recommend? We need no more than 6 ports at the moment, and would prefer a plug-and-play unmanaged switch.
Posted Oct 1, 2019, 12:10 PM UTC
022
What kind of 10GbE?
RJ45 or SFP+ ?
Why on earth would you actually prefer not being able to troubleshoot, diagnose or gather any kind of awareness as to network health or performance?
Why is the inability to manage your network (equipment) an attractive feature or quality?
Do you enjoy a good mystery or something?
my guess would be that unmanaged as a feature means the admins who do not really understand networking cannot be asked to troubleshoot it in the future.
Makes perfect sense.
That way when you can't solve the mysterious performance problem, and you hire external consulting, everyone can stand around the switch with hands on their hips and loot at it in disappointment, and agree that in order to troubleshoot the issue, we're gonna have to replace the shitty switch with a non-shitty one.
Spending money twice is always a better approach to an infrastructure design.
I should document that in our best-practices repository.
Here u/edstorm this is probably what you want:
https://www.netgear.com/business/products/switches/unmanaged/XS508M.aspx#tab-techspecs
https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Ethernet-Unmanaged-Rackmount-Protection/dp/B075Q66RKF/
$599 on Amazon
You'd have to put a gun to my head to get me to buy an unmanaged 10GbE switch. But you do you, and I'll do what I do.
I fully agree, even more when Jerry in the other room transfers files at gig speeds still. Oops, better tripplencheck that cabling!
What is doubly stupid is that Netgear's "smart" managed version, the XS708E, appears to actually be $569 on Amazon right now so you would actually be paying more for a dumb switch. Given even their smart switch is still a pretty basic managed switch, but you would have to be pretty dumb to pay more for a dumb switch.
Good find.
I don't spend much time on netgear.com because... reasons.
I went with HP:s 6-port Officeconnect model instead. Similar price, but at least it's HP and not ack ptui Netgear. :) It's managed though, and Netgear has one in this price range that's managed also.
That must be a VERY shitty consultant who doesnt know how to properly troubleshoot a network with unmanaged switch in the middle?
One host knows it sent data.
One host is unable to indicate that it did not receive the data.
The transport or application protocol may, or may not provide sequence numbers to help you see that packets failed to arrive.
All you know is that data didn't get delivered to the destination.
The switch can't help you solve the puzzle.
The switch can't show you port counters or help you span a port.
So you can suspect the switch did something wrong, but you cannot KNOW that the switch did something wrong.
A physical tap before or after the switch doesn't help you understand tail-drop is happening inside the managed switch.
A physical tap might let you see that a host is firing PAUSE requests, asking for the switch to hold up a second.
But you can't see how the switch reacted to that request. There is no interface counter. There is no debug log.
So you're back to educated guesses.
You can troubleshoot and you can make recommendations, but you can't KNOW the cause.
Ding ding ding - yep