I need to buy a 1RU switch for my servers, so I'm looking for some ideas of what to get.

I need the switch primarily to connect all of my severs together on a local network for backup purposes, not for internet connectivity. If I got one for this, I would just need a cheap second hand switch as it's not very important. Would want at least 16 ports, and needs to be 1RU.

However, I'm not sure if I should get a decent switch that supports VLAN's and connect all of my servers internet connections through the switch as well as the local network. At the moment all of my servers are plugged in to my providers switch (ie all I own is the servers, no networking gear).

Can anyone give me some pros and cons of running my internet connection through my own switch? At the moment I can't really see any advantages - the only thing I can think of, is if the switch crashes then I need to pay a call-out fee to restart it, whereas if the DC's switch crashes, they will go and fix it for free (and faster too)

Just to double check, is the difference between having VLANs and no VLANs what sets switches as managed/unmanaged?

Also, if anyone can recommend some good switches, or somewhere good to buy them, or PM me if you have any that you want to sell!

Hi

While it may save costs to have your own switch it would seem as you said it would be better to let the DC manage your switch to lower your exposure and let there ops teams monitor it 24/7 and worry about it.

What I would recommend is getting an unmanaged switch and connecting it just to the secondry network ports of your local systems and a backup server and doing the backups this way.

Just food for thought. You could also plug a 3g connection into it and have remote connection into the network in case something goes wrong on your providers end.

For something like this I would recommend purchasing an HP Switch as they can be had at a resonable price and are of a reasonable quality.

Thanks, I think I might just buy a cheap second hand switch off eBay for the backup network

Fair Enough

You can pickup some cheap unmanaged 16 port ones for around $50

But if it fails and you can't restore a backup so then you have to go onsite it will cost you.

So do not get something to cheap and/or shonky.