What is a good 25 Gb used enterprise grade network switch to look for on eBay? I’m looking for 16-24 ports. This will be for a small office, with about 4-6 workstations and 5-6 servers.
Would be great if it supported 10G/25G on same ports (SFP+/SFP28).
Do NOT want something that requires a subscription, nor is locked by the OEM and requires doing backflips and lots of research and trial and error to get it to work or update the firmware or get into the firmware.
Currently have a QNAP 16 port 25 Gb switch. I haven’t deployed it at this point, but have read elsewhere that it won’t work with FEC connections - either connecting to another 25 G switch, nor a NIC that requires FEC (forward error correction).
Some model of Dell, HPE, Netgear, etc?
Ah - I just thought of what will probably be a deal-killer. It needs to be quiet. The QNAP is quite. I don’t want something that sounds like a typical datacenter server, switch. Maybe it doesn’t exist.
I looked at Ubiquiti, but it only had FOUR 25Gb ports. FOUR. Also, I thought I had a vague memory of hearing someone on a youtube channel mention that the Ubiquiti 10 G & 25 G switches didn’t have quite the throughput as most other switches? Maybe I remembering that wrong…
(I have a host of Mellanox Connect-X 4 cards, if that matters.)
Thanks for all the info. I misspoke on the ports. Looking for 16-24 ports of SFP28 (mistyped QSFP28). I certainly wouldn’t mind some QSFP28 ports also on there, but mainly need 25 Gb that can be connected to another 25 Gb switch later, if needed.
Also - what is the difference in quality/reliability/throughput of QNAP vs Mikrotik? I’ve never worked with Mikrotik products in any companies, nor datacenter. Have only worked with two QNAP switches.
I like that the Mikrotik switch has dual power supplies. Unless I’m mistaken, I was under the impression that Mikrotik was a budget line of products? (I know the QNAP is evidently budget-level.)
I mean, in a TOR-role, QSFP can just break out to 4x SFP
They are both not Cisco/Juniper/Arista/Aruba, but definetly “good enough”-tier.
They are budget tier, which shows in strange ways.
For example they have a lot of features available, but you need to pay attention to which of them get moved off of the switch chip and into the sometimes underwhelming CPUs.
So L2/L2+ may be fine, and L3-doings then murder performance.
Interestingly, I just watched a review last night, of a different Mikrotik router. He said something very similar. He mentioned that Mikrotik was notorious for using subpar CPUs and then moving some functions to software, because of the lackluster CPU not being able to handle the additional functions. (Or, something to that effect.)
They often have hardware-offloading so the switch-chip does all the magic with the CPU just pulling the strings.
Basically, look at the test-data they have on their product pages. When your usecase has can live with the published numbers, good. If not, it will likely get expensive.
