Practical difference between CISCO C2960PD-8TT-L and Netgear ProSafe GS108P

Question

So I'm setting up a new department and doing some shopping for our new 4 developer team. I need to get some switches so that each member has at least 2 ethernet ports +1 with POE for an IP phone (1 port for laptop, 1 for special hardware we're developing software for, 1 for a Cisco IP Phone 7942), and I was recommended by our main IT guy to get the CISCO C2960PD-8TT-L which is a ~$500 USD switch which has console management which we don't need. That recommendation came from a higher upper who sent an email recommending that switch upon seeing hubs being used all over (probably causing trouble in our network).

For our team of 4 people, I'm thinking on getting the Netgear ProSafe GS108P instead and then hook up four 4-port Netgear FS105, 1 for each team member. This would be ~$240 USD in switches that are already used in another of our offices instead of ~$1000 USD in two high 8-port switches that look like overkill to me.

Am I overlooking something, or the Cisco switches really are overkill for our software developer team?.

Answer 1

Well, do you want to manage or not? If you don't need the management features and your 'main IT guy' didn't have any ideas in mind that required the extra capabilities of managed switches, then get the NetGear consumer stuff. If you need support for 802.1x, VLANs, DHCP snooping, etc. then you might need to step up the game and get the Cisco one.

One other thing to look at is that consumer switches are often lacking in backplane performance. If you're only using the switch to get connectivity, this won't be a problem, but if you need higher throughput then be careful with that.

Answer 2

Why do you want so many switches? I'm not sure of the layout of your office but wouldn't it be easier and less devices to manage to just have a single 48-port switch and run 3-4 floor port patches to each desk?

Reducing the risk of switch misconfiguration, cabling errors etc.