Price difference between switches

Bigdogbmx

Bigdogbmx

Bigdogbmx

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I have a fairly basic question about the prices of networking hardware. Basically for my course we have been asked to present a proposal to an imaginary company telling them to upgrade to a 100mbps network. The thing that im stumped on is the huge difference in prices between managed and unmanaged switches. For example, an 8 port unmanaged normal switch costs about £20. However an 8 port Cisco C2960 costs around £300. How can I justify the cost of the more advanced switches in my proposal?
Any answers welcome, Thanks, George.
 
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It comes down to features required and reliability.

Your £20 unmanaged switch will only support auto-negotiated links, will have limited buffering and probably a throughput of less than all ports combined. Your managed switch will support fixed speed/duplex, wire speed for all ports, SNMP for stats and management, port security such as MAC filtering, VLAN support, QoS, port spanning and multi-layer options will support routing.

You probably think nothing of powering off/on your cheap home switch/router if there's issues. You simply can't do this in a corporate environment without some sort of major impact, so you need some sort of enterprise solution and use kit that will stay up and working for years.
 
Bigdogbmx said:
I have a fairly basic question about the prices of networking hardware. Basically for my course we have been asked to present a proposal to an imaginary company telling them to upgrade to a 100mbps network. The thing that im stumped on is the huge difference in prices between managed and unmanaged switches. For example, an 8 port unmanaged normal switch costs about £20. However an 8 port Cisco C2960 costs around £300. How can I justify the cost of the more advanced switches in my proposal?
Any answers welcome, Thanks, George.
Click to expand...
Quick answer as I am at work...

You would never use an unmanaged switch in a corporate environment.

I did a few Nortel courses on switching, and it all comes down to security, routing traffic appropriately (i.e. down to the level of seperating Internet bound TCP/IP traffic from intranet TCP/IP traffic for instance and managing QOS), setting up and managing vLans, and crucually, basic security measures, like preventing simple DOS and SYN-ACK attacks on servers and so on.

Statistical information for capacity planning, setting up SNMP traps, etc are also acheivable through managed switches. If you want more detailed answers, you can drop me a line on MSN.
 
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