Ditch 4 switches and use just one?

[tekrich]

We have a house with 3 levels, ground, 1st, and 2nd floor, with the ISP modem coming in on the 1st floor.

My current set up is Modem > AX88U > Main 8 port switch.

From the main 8 port switch I have 2 lines run up to the 2nd floor, each to a switch, one is a PoE switch for CCTV, the other switch for HDHomerun and the Server.

Again, from the main 8 port switch I have another line going downstairs to another PoE switch for a CCTV camera and the Nvidia Shield.

I also have another small switch on the 1st floor for my PC and printer. This is fed from the main router.

It works fine and isn't causing any issues. But I can't help thinking that I should probably just change the 'Main' switch to something like a 24 port +PoE, and run individual lines to all the clients, thus eliminating the need for all the other switches on my network.

Just to confirm, I have no network issues but want to get rid of points of failure.

Any ideas/comments welcome.

 

[L&LD]

I would vote to enjoy your working network for as long as possible.

If/when a need occurs, real upgrades are mere dollars away.

 

[Trip]

Flattening a switching fabric is almost always a good idea for all the obvious reasons: fewer bandwidth bottlenecks, removal of cascaded single points of failure, big reduction in broadcast overhead, centralization of management, lower overall latency, more direct control and accounting of hosts, convergence of PoE source points, etc. etc. etc.

That being said, if you're not really doing enough on the home network to saturate your interconnects, fill your switch buffers and/or brush up against any latency constraints, then you'll probably see very little real-world benefit from doing what you propose with a single switch and home-running everything. Doesn't mean it isn't a good idea, but unless you're really hankering for any of those upsides, I'd probably just get to it as the need presents itself, per what @L&LD said.

 

[L&LD]

And an additional thought; any reason why the router goes to the switch with a single LAN run? Why not use the ports directly on the RT-AX88U instead (for now)?

It should be better than all WAN traffic going through a single cable.

 

[coxhaus]

Putting all your ports on 1 backplane in 1 switch is always a good idea. The problem with a large POE+ switch is you will inherit fans. So to me at home I use 2 switches only to save not having fans. I use my Cisco layer 3 switch with 1 small Cisco POE+ switch to power my wireless Cisco APs. This keeps my switches silent with no fans.

 

[Trip]

The problem with a large POE+ switch is you will inherit fans.

Classically true, but there's a growing list of exceptions, depending on PoE budget and port density:

• Ubiquiti USW-24-POE Gen2 - 120W, Fanless
• Cisco C2960L-24PS-LL & -24PQS-LL - 195W PoE, Fanless
• Brocade ICX7150-24P & -48P - <150W = Fan off in "Silent Mode"
• Zyxel GS1920-24HPv2 & -48HPv2 - 370W, <=26dB Fan (less than a whisper)

The combo of a small PoE switch plus a larger silent non-PoE model is a great work-around, though. With Ruckus (Brocade) ICX7150, you can even run a stack over SFP+ ports completely fanless, with PoE on larger models or the smaller C12.

 

[tekrich]

And an additional thought; any reason why the router goes to the switch with a single LAN run? Why not use the ports directly on the RT-AX88U instead (for now)?

It should be better than all WAN traffic going through a single cable.

I had the switch mounted near the router anyway, so decided to have LAN traffic in the switch, with the router giving access to WAN.

We only have 100Mb/s down, 10Mb/s up so the single gigabit link to the router shouldn't be a problem. And test show that. Also the switch and router support Link aggregation on ports 1 & 2 if I needed a shared 2GB link to WAN... if that is the way it works.