Managed switches - reliable & inexpensive, possible?

[MrLittlePants]

Hi all,
Can anybody suggest a vendor who is to switches what MikroTik is to routers and Ubiquiti is to wireless equipment? ie someone who makes reliable, value oriented switches - managed L2 or L3 switches specifically.

I'm looking to replace a handful of dumb switches with managed L2 switches, but haven't had the best experience with the lower end of the market (Netgear etc). I've seen cheap TP-Link switches advertised (SG1016DE/SG2216), but have no idea what they're like. I'm looking for a few sizes - 8, 16 and 24 port for the most part.

Thoughts/suggestions?

 

[thiggins]

What bad experience have you had with low-end smart switches?

We have looked at one TP-Link switch.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanw...-link-tl-sg2216-gigabit-smart-switch-reviewed

TP-LINK makes decent stuff, focusing on "value" (low-cost). Their VPN and multi-WAN routers seem solid from comments I have seen.

Can't say anything about long-term reliability on any products.

 

[MrLittlePants]

What bad experience have you had with low-end smart switches?

Mostly just unimpressed with the configuration options available - the web interfaces I've used have not been great and the consoles were very lacking - that said, it was some time ago that I last used a Prosafe or similar, so things may have changed.

I found the review shortly after posting - thanks for that. Re the lack of IPv6 support, presumably this is only an issue if you want to access the management interface of the switch via IPv6 - these are only L2 switches, so should be agnostic to v4/v6 traffic, right?

 

[abailey]

I have both the TL-SG2216 and the TL-SL2210 from TP-Link and have been extremely pleased. The GUI is the best I have used. It just makes sense to me and all the features seem to be there. I have not had to go into the CLI yet. I was skeptical of the switches at first but now sing their praises as they have been rock solid. If you want to get a feel for what the GUI looks like they have a couple of Emulators here: http://www.tp-link.us/support/emulators/?pcid=204

As far as the IPv6, yes at Layer 2 it does not matter. But on the description of the switch it list this: •L2/L3/L4 QoS and IGMP Snooping optimize voice and video application
If that is really accurate, some of the QOS features may not work correctly with IPv6.

 

[azazel1024]

What bad experience have you had with low-end smart switches?

We have looked at one TP-Link switch.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanw...-link-tl-sg2216-gigabit-smart-switch-reviewed

TP-LINK makes decent stuff, focusing on "value" (low-cost). Their VPN and multi-WAN routers seem solid from comments I have seen.

Can't say anything about long-term reliability on any products.

I have that one, the SG-2216 and its a very good switch. The only beef I have is the latest two firmwares don't play well with the IE11 java engine...but selectively. IE11 desktop, one some of the management pages, it'll reset back to the default landing page if you try to click through the sub pages. On my tablet with metro IE11 (and on my desktop in metro IE11), the web interface works just fine.

Very odd (it works fine in IE10 and firefox).

Anyway, I am more or less pretty impressed with it. Low down power consumption (mine uses around 10w with 8 ports active), only stability issues I had were after a power outage that fried my FIOS ONT box. After a couple of weeks I realized a networking issue I was having was from the switch, but a quick push of the button to return to factory defaults cleared the issue (I am thinking a corrupted ARP/MAC table based on what was occuring).

I also have a Trendnet TEG-160ws. Its not as nice, but it works pretty well and I picked it up used for $60 shipped. The one interesting thing I've noticed is to stay away from ports 13-16 unless the rest of the switch is full (mine only has 4 ports in use). Those last 4 ports are on individual switch modules on the PCB and using them results in around 1.5w per active port extra power consumption, compared to around .5w per port extra power consumption on ports 1-12 (currently 9.2w with 4 ports active).

 

[spinkham]

Depends on what you want.

If you only need 5 ports, Mikrotik's switches are quite serviceable.

I have a TP-Link TL-SG3216 and I've been a bit disappointed in it.

First of all, I got the 32xx series instead of the lower ones because it supported 802.1x, only to find it's non-standard and only works with their own supplicant, which makes it useless on anything but Windows and useless for my intended uses.

Also, port mirroring seems to drop a lot of frames in situations I've never had problems with other switches (only one pair of ports mirrored to monitor traffic).

On the other hand, it's cheap and everything else I've tried works well....

I have a lot of recent SME managed switches, I'd rank the switch lines like this:

#1: Cisco SG-300 - This is great, full featured layer 3 switch.

#2: Cisco SG-200 - Not as full featured, has some limitations, but they're the same or better as you'll find in everything else in the class, and unlike everyone else they are clearly documented.

I'd say the next two are tied, depending on what you're looking for.

#3 HP-1810 - Great interface, solid for what it does, only downside is it is not as feature rich as some of the other options(no protected ports, no 802.1x, etc)

#3 Netgear GS108Tv2 and other "advance smart switches" they've updated recently - These are great, totally packed with features in recent firmware, though the interface for some features is unintuitive to me. They're mostly problem free as long as yours has the CPU paste properly applied and you're use the latest firmware. If you buy a lot of them you will have some that fail fairly early, so keep a spare. Reliability and interface are downsides, but in terms of features for price they're unbeatable(and unlike TP-Link, all the advanced featuers work like you'd expect). The recent firmwares have a lot more features then advertised for the switch, read recent firmware updates for details (things like protected ports, IPv6 compatibility, etc)

#4 TP-Link - If you're looking for basic smart managed switch and don't expect fully managed features to work right, these are a great deal. Web interface is pretty good, VLANs, LAGS and similar basic functionality work just fine. If you use anything more complicated though, expect to hit weird bugs. Reliability seems about the same as recent release of Netgear hardware, which isn't top shelf but fine for home use. Would not put either in a corporate lan.


Personally I'm mostly buying either the Cisco SG-300, Netgear advanced smart switch line (GS108Tv2 & similar) or TP-Link unmanaged switches depending on what features I need, but your price/features/interface preferences might be different than mine

 

[uscallesen]

Good post by spinkham - I agree with his choice of low-end equipment. I can based on personal experience (got a couple of them myself) recommend the Cisco SG300 series as well as the Netgear GS108Tv2 - like spinkham said, they are running very mature and feature rich firmware.

I work for a service provider and am used to high end Cisco and Juniper gear - The biggest issue with working with these low-end boxes is that they lack solid CLI's (IOS/Junos etc) - but once you accept that and come to appreciate the wealth of features for a small price - they are really hard to beat.

 

[mervincm]

What about mikrotik's larger switches?

 

[trunolimit]

Nice suggestions. I'm going to throw in the GSM5212 as an option. I've been looking for a managed Poe switch and this is the cheapest I've found(cost per port wise).