This offer looks too good to be true, so any thoughts on this brand, is it worth buying? (I’m in Europe, so additional customs/duty charges will apply anyway)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/192971446249
TIA!
These are pretty old. I’m not sure if I would recommend getting in to these. The ports were activated on a per-license basis. Without knowing the actual licenses on the unit, I would definitely avoid. I’m not sure if it would be possible to “purchase” the licensing to activate any unlicensed ports.
Beyond that, I think Infiniband or just regular iSCSI for SAN usage would be a better choice these days.
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Now that you mention it, I recall an earlier conversation about these. So that’s a definite no then. Thx, saved me lots of money!
Ive worked with Brocade switches in the DoD before, working with the CLI and applying changes are a bit slow at times compared to Cisco. But other than that, no complaints
(Not this particular model, mostly just 24 port gigabit stuff and then using a media converter to fiber for runs between buildings.
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To be clear, these are ancient Fibre Channel switches used for Fibre-Channel SAN. They won’t do anything Ethernet.
10 years ago these were “old” (I think they were officially EOL’d in 2014-2015) but I was still supporting them in data-centers for customers that had small Fibre-Channel SAN needs.
These things are easy to use and zoning is really straight-forward.
Fibre-Channel is still alive and well. Current Gen speeds are 32 and 64Gbps (128Gbps is on the radar). It’s pretty expensive for current Gen hardware. I think embracing iSCSI at the homelab level is probably a better bet. Infiniband is also a fairly affordable platform on the used market for good speeds.
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Thx for that. I was really after a cheap(-ish) decent fibre switch of sorts. Serve-the-home did a video about those last summer, but is TP-Link really the only option for a budget network upgrade? Mikrotik is effectively a level up, price-wise. And who can be trusted not to have hidden backdoors in their firmware? I’ll be searching some more 
What are you actually looking for? The Brocade listed above is a Fibre-Channel (totally different technology than Ethernet).
If you’re looking for Ethernet switches that can use optics, how many ports are you looking for? How fast do the ports need to be?
I’m indeed looking for an Ethernet switch, the Brocade unit above was an error on my part. Port speed won’t need to be above 1Gb/s (SFP) right now, but that requirement may change in future as the current optical network cards I have are SFP+ (1 or 10Gb/s). I don’t have the optical modules yet, nor the fibre itself. What I’m after is a high-speed/high-capacity local network backbone between router, primary+backup servers and my desktop, basically a home-lab of sorts. My current network is 1Gb/s (wired RJ45) and not saturated so anything faster is probably a waste of money ATM.
That said, both servers are now by default off* given the energy prices here. This is researching stuff for better times, TBH.
*IPMI is such a great tool 
Mikrotik is pretty reasonable and power-efficient. Any discarded Enterprise equipment is going to be pretty loud and power hungry. Might want to look at something like the CRS309 for low-port count 1G/10G switching.
I’m not really aware of other low-cost options.
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To be safe against that threat, you would have to stack firewalls, ideally with an OpenSource one on the outside where YOU have audited the entire software stack yourself.
Let’s be honest, not many individuals are that interesting to any government agency
Mikrotik CRS309 would be my pick. The 1Gig RJ45 in combination with 8 SFP+ makes for an ideal “may expand later”-switch.
Aruba Instant On 1930 (JL682A#ABB) would be another option, same-ish price range, 24x 1Gig RJ45 and 4x SFP+, Fanless. Problem right now is them being unavailable everywhere.
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Many thanks, more stuff to contemplate!
For ethernet options in the Brocade space, you can check out this thread:
Brocade ethernet gear is more datacenter oriented than mikrotik, way beefier and way more expensive, but there are options if you need/want to experiment with 10/40Gbit and/or layer 3 routing on a budget, options that you usually pay in noise and power draw
The top post has a very good description of options, budgets, features and power draw
For homelabbers that can afford the 100w power draw and the noise, the ICX-6610 is a beast, 40Gbit ports, 16x10gbit, POE, stacking, it can even do encryption over the stacking trunks at line rate (40Gbit) … the non POE version can be found on ebay us for ~200USD … donside is that it is a screamer, it is bulky, it uses a lot of power and it cannot be quieted unless you add to it an arduino to fake the PWM signal the power supply needs from the FANs to even power on …
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