Rob wrote:
On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 04:22:51PM -0500, Peter Teuben wrote:
i see more and more "consumer" Gbit switches available in
bestbuy etc. But the big guns like Cisco still sell for
$2-3k. if you're just doing Gbit networking, even in small
groups, do you really need to keep buying them $$$? What's
their advantage? A need for Cisco exams to configure them?
1) Vlans
2) all switches (that I know of) are not fully provisioned, meaning
that you cannot have all ports going at full speed at the same time.
Better switches are better provisioned.
3) a lot of cisco switches let you do some layer 3 stuff too... depends
which ones you are talking about.
A few other things the "enterprise" switches get you are larger
port buffers, fancy QoS to manage those buffers, IGMP support
for multicast, port mirroring for troubleshooting, snmp for management,
larger port counts, etc.
If you're just sharing files around the house, you probably don't
need any of this. If you've got a new 10 machine cluster, you
probably want spend a little more for a switch that will perform
better (non-blocking architecture, larger buffers). The larger
your network gets, the more important the management features become.
-Karl
