Experience with Cisco Small Business switches?

[matgar]

Hi guys.

I thought I would ask if any of you have experience with Ciscos Small Business switches.
Currently I'm looking at switch recommendations for a small non profit organisation, so on the cheaper side.
From what I can see the SG250X-48P seems to fill all the requirements. ok price,  48x1gb ports, POE+  2/2x10GB uplinks.
It seems to have a CLI (so that I hopefully feel at home from working with 2960s and 3560s previously)
Though previously when I worked with the Catalyst line of switches from Cisco I sometimes ran into some caveats with some of the cheaper models not supporting all the functions I was used to.
So the question is, have any of you guys run into any problems with the SG line of switches that surprised you.

Also, even though I'm tempted to buy Cisco products, that's not a requirement, I just don't want something that only has a clunky GUI for administration.
But if you have any recommendations on other products I can have a look at that would also be appreciated.

[Dieselboy]

Whats the use-case? Do you really just need a switch to connect users and computers to the internet in small company? Take a look at HP procurve. Good bang for buck and they have a lifetime warranty. You can get CLI ones. I bought a couple of HTTP only switches which was a bit of a disappointment when I unboxed them, but they have been solid for their use which is simply to connect our ASA WAN to the telco links. They are layer 2 switches and just switch the VLANs between the ASAs and the telcos.

What do you need the 10GB uplinks for? Core network or are they marked for servers?

IF this is for you personally, you could look for slightly older Cisco switches. Like a 3560 or 2960

[matgar]

The company is looking to buy 2 new switches to replace 2 old existing switches. (one is a Dell and the other is a Zyxel)
One will be used as a collapsed core to the access switches and one for the servers and storage.
The 10GB uplink would be used between the 2 new switches.
10GB uplink is partly for future proofing, but also that all storage and user profiles are centralized, so there is a fair amount of traffic on the interconnect link.
Currently there's only one 1GB link between them, that is easily overwhelmed.
Yes, ether-channel is a possibility but since the old switches are to be replaced going with 10GB uplinks seems like a good idea.
Looking at 10Gbase-T to avoid having to buy SFP+ modules at this time.
POE is needed.
L3 routing between VLANs is needed, static and/or RIP is fine.
ACL is needed.

HP procurve seems like it's not sold any longer, they seem to be HPE Aruba now.
The HPE Aruba 2930M 48G PoE+ 1-slot Switch (JL322A) seems to fill the requirements, but is about double the price compared to a SG250X-48P.
Does anyone have experience with these Aruba (HP) switches.

[deanwebb]

Both Aruba and Cisco SG2XX switches are good for what you pay. The HTTPS-only Cisco takes a little getting used to for configuring, but it can be done. Keep in mind that small business switches are going to be sharply limited in what they can do, relative to a more fully-featured switch model.

[SimonV]

I have experience pulling them out 

[Dieselboy]

I would be careful with the storage side of things. Storage iscsi traffic is bursty and needs to get there. Usually, cheap switches have small shared buffers. This can mean that a burst in storage tries to use up many buffers and can fill them up. Additional packets will be dropped at the switch ingress due to no buffers. If the switch is also switching data traffic then that could be impacted in that moment. Depends on how busy the storage is.
Quick story: In my case I have servers on 40GB in a chassis and a Cisco Fabric switch capable of switching 960GB/s. Utilisation on the links going to the SAN are just a few hundred MB on average. However, setting proper QoS for the storage traffic (which meant that the storage goes first in this case), gave a noticeable improvement on the performance and feel of the systems and apps. It was running OK before but there were failover issues (issues during the failover). So I approached it from the beginning and audited the whole thing and realised that change was required.

IMO - if you want to just run the 2 switches, I'd use 1 as a core for servers and everything else, and the 2nd one as a storage switch that connects to the SAN to the iSCSI storage NICs on the servers.