Power Over Ethernet Switches
- Thread starter electron
- Start date
tmbrown97
Senior Member
wuench said:
My post is about cisco, not you personally... but "Cisco Small Business" is Linksys. I'm glad yours has worked out well - and for a lot of people who buy in small volumes they may never experience the same thing I did - but I'll say that my experience with Cisco/Linksys products was so bad that I flat out won't touch the stuff.
Briefly - When their products fail, it's rarely just dead one day - instead, it's that your router is locked up one day; then again; then again - you might start to suspect your ISP or not even put the pattern together until it happens more and more and more. Many people I know never attributed this to Linksys directly but got frustrated and changed ISP's who brought out a new all-in-one router/modem removing the linksys from the equation so they never knew the difference. I've wasted dozens of hours of my life troubleshooting the most obscure network issues that came down to failing Cisco Small Business switches just failing. I've even talked to other IT outsourcing companies who've set policies that if their customers want to use Cisco Small Business products, then they have to buy 2 or they won't support them - because the very first thing they do is replace the product, then look elsewhere for issues if that doesn't fix it. They've learned that it's always the CSB gear that fails and not a configuration issue.
I also have supported small offices and dozens of home users (have always done it for many of the people I work with) where I set up and maintain their networks and in the early days I was using linksys, but started noticing the failure rates and inferior performance and as they failed I replaced them all with NetGear and haven't looked back (if you've really been into networking a long time, you might remember when NetGear first came out - it was crap too; incompatible with other brands and sketchy but they got it right eventually). These are just my experiences - but it seems like the Linksys and CSB products are really the only ones I've ever replaced due to failure - and it's been a lot of them. I had really hoped things would get better when Cisco bought them, but that just didn't happen. Just my $.02.
wuench
Senior Member
As far as recommendations we are just going to have to agree to disagree. You have your experiences and I have had mine. But I do agree with you on one thing, I would never recommend them for a business of any size, nor would I recommend Netgear or anything else but Cisco Catalyst or above. But that mostly has to do with the level of support you can expect. And I have heard great things about NetGear as a consumer switch.
I should mention I did have one issue with throughput when I got the 300-10's, but it was fixed with a firmware upgrade, that is about as Cisco as you can get
And I did buy a smaller (not 300 series) Linksys dumb gigabit switch to use that could not handle my bluray traffic, even though it said "Certified for Video" on a sticker on the box.
I should mention I did have one issue with throughput when I got the 300-10's, but it was fixed with a firmware upgrade, that is about as Cisco as you can get
And I did buy a smaller (not 300 series) Linksys dumb gigabit switch to use that could not handle my bluray traffic, even though it said "Certified for Video" on a sticker on the box.
tmbrown97
Senior Member
heh - I have 2 new Catalyst 3560x gigabit 48-port switches in on my desk right now I ordered to replace the junk I inherited when I took over! Layer 3 switches are awesome. Powered for the office, unpowered for the data center (we're a small joint). That said if you don't need management features, HP has some great switches too - I've often used them for iSCSI where I need an enterprise grade switch with wire speed and jumbo packet support but really don't need anything else.
I was pretty impressed the other day - doing 200GB file transfers and through the netgear I was getting 100% utilization at gigabit speeds according to Windows task manager - those still took forever though...
I was pretty impressed the other day - doing 200GB file transfers and through the netgear I was getting 100% utilization at gigabit speeds according to Windows task manager - those still took forever though...
pete_c
Guru
Personally here my concern was related to power draw from my new little touchscreens and nothing really to do with POE cameras.
The touchscreens come with 4 AMP power supplies and draw 1.X AMPs on bootup. I have 10 of these right now on line. The POE cameras draw a fraction of the power that the touchscreens draw.
With the Tycon midspan injectors I can go to about 600-700 watts total power.
The touchscreens come with 4 AMP power supplies and draw 1.X AMPs on bootup. I have 10 of these right now on line. The POE cameras draw a fraction of the power that the touchscreens draw.
With the Tycon midspan injectors I can go to about 600-700 watts total power.
And just to prove a point how experiences can be so different, I absolutely love the Netgear pro line (PRO only), hardware is rock solid (especially their VPN routers and switches), does well in spaces with overheating problems, have over 50 deployed, 0 failures, with uptimes expressed in years.
tmbrown97
Senior Member
I do wonder if it has to do with the product lines - but yeah, I absolutely love the Netgear Pro stuff - Pro, Pro Plus, etc... the square metal cases, not the white oval plastic ones. They support VLAN and QoS, and they have plenty of POE options, as well as switches powered by POE so you can have your entire network split out, VLAN'd, all powered off the main closet... way more advanced than most users could dream of, and I've never had a netgear switch fail me. I've also seen awesome performance - both standard and large-frame for iSCSI.
Mario23
Member
I have two Netgear pro safe units right now, a GS724 and a GS510 POE. I know I spent more than I had to but I wanted the management features these units deploy as well as the stacking ability. Also the poe switch is a full 8 poe ports which I also needed so the choices slimmed down from there. The poe switch is 8 port poe plus and runs all my different cams great. Both switches have worked flawlessly for me so I guess I'm one of those who can say they appear to be solid...at least in this product line. When I first bought the 724, I had issues with it. Called Netgear and they determined it was a faulty unit and immediately replaced it. So far I can't complain about Netgear. I've seen complaints about all these products and gleaming reviews at the same time so I figured its just gonna have to be experienced for myself to see what works and what doesn't.
activemind
Active Member
Can someone please answer this question if they have experience with it? My whole network is gigabit and I am spec-ing out my POE network. Do I NEED gig there or I should be fine with 10/100 for the camera stuff. And I am talking 1MP+ cameras (Dahua mid range comes to mind)...how much is their traffic and how chatty does the network get if you have a couple (6-10) of these!dgage said:
tmbrown97
Senior Member
You'd be fine with 10MB honestly; Can you imagine if you were sucking gigabit or even 100mb per camera? That's a TON of data!!
To be fair, quantity matters - because 20 cameras on 10mb - the camera ports would be fine but the server would be clogged up...
If it were me, I'd do 10/100 on a switch that has a gigabit port and I'd put the DVR on the gig port.
To be fair, quantity matters - because 20 cameras on 10mb - the camera ports would be fine but the server would be clogged up...
If it were me, I'd do 10/100 on a switch that has a gigabit port and I'd put the DVR on the gig port.
pete_c
Guru
Here I will keep plugging my TyconPower TP-MS324 midspan injector. It is built to last for a very long time.
I like it so much that I have purchased now all of their small POE switches to goof around with.
http://www.tyconpower.com/products/files/TPS_POE_Midspan_Injector_Spec_Sheet.pdf
I like it so much that I have purchased now all of their small POE switches to goof around with.
http://www.tyconpower.com/products/files/TPS_POE_Midspan_Injector_Spec_Sheet.pdf
Curious, has anybody heard/used one of these (a multi-port POE injector):
http://www.amazon.com/WS-POE-8-ENC-Multi-Passive-Injector-devices/dp/B0075F7F2O/ref=sr_1_10?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1371762063&sr=1-10&keywords=poe+injector
Reason I ask, is that I have a un-utilized 24 port gigabit switch right next to where my potential IP cams are coming in. Not sure how many future cams I'll have (thinking around 4). I could go with the single POE injectors, a dedicated POE Switch, or this. Leaning towards the switch, but want to make sure its not underpowered. Seems like its the cleanest method.
Does distance of cat6 run become a factor with any of these solutions?
Steve
http://www.amazon.com/WS-POE-8-ENC-Multi-Passive-Injector-devices/dp/B0075F7F2O/ref=sr_1_10?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1371762063&sr=1-10&keywords=poe+injector
Reason I ask, is that I have a un-utilized 24 port gigabit switch right next to where my potential IP cams are coming in. Not sure how many future cams I'll have (thinking around 4). I could go with the single POE injectors, a dedicated POE Switch, or this. Leaning towards the switch, but want to make sure its not underpowered. Seems like its the cleanest method.
Does distance of cat6 run become a factor with any of these solutions?
Steve
