Ross Walker wrote: > Look there really are 3 tiers for network equipment. The first two > tiers all give wire speed performance and have managed layer 2 and 3 > options. The last tier is for consumer home use. > > Tier 1 might have high-end Cisco, Juniper or Nortel (and others) that > have modular enclosures redundant power supplies and heavenly price > tags. These are typically used in large enterprises that can afford > them. > > Tier 2 might have Dell Powerconnects and HP Procurves and Cisco 2000 > series products. These are good stable well performing products and > are gobbled up in heaps by small and medium businesses. These are the > usual choice for small enterprises and come in managed and unmanaged, > layer 2 of layer 3, power over Ethernet of not or a combination of > those. > > Tier 3 contain your Linksys, DLink and Zyxel brand products. They > basically just get the job done, but might need reset every now and > then and probably can't run more then 2 ports at a full 1GBe > simultaneously. They are for home use and are prices as such. Some > will be better then others and some might be very good, but they are > not designed for business use and thus shouldn't be used as such. > I've got a 24 port Netgear GSM7224 Layer 2 managed GigE switch in my lab, I'd put it squarely in tier 2.... its wirespeed on all 24 ports, and capable of supporting jumbo frames, channel bonding, VLANs, etc etc etc. 4 of its 24 ports are crosswired to SBIC optical ports so you can use it with singlemode or multimode fiber links. its in a metal rack mountable 1U chassis.