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My company is moving into a much larger space and I need to find a solution for our switching needs. The server room is centrally located so I am able to having all switching in the main server room. The number of ports is rather high for the space, currently looking to be around 250 in total

The basic issue is that I need find a good solution for switching for that number of ports. I was attracted to the idea of the modular switch or logical stack.

A couple of questions came up as I compared HP and Netgear switches.

  1. What have peoples experience been with full layer 3 switches from Netgear? It seems to be the highest end switch they sell, which has me concerned that is really out of their league.

  2. The switching kit for the netgear provides 24gb of throughput between the switches. Is enough bandwidth for an entertainment company dealing with large files on a regular basis? We will have 70 employees at the new space.

  3. A third question that has come to mine is if anyone has any question with the Software of the Netgear managed switches. Any thoughts?

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    I am not familiar with those particular models, but I have had bad experiences with Netgear equipment in the past. HP has been pretty good.
    – Zoredache
    Aug 6, 2010 at 21:42
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    I'll second the first comment. I had prosumer netgear switches blow up their power adapters twice after a year or so.
    – Jasper
    Aug 7, 2010 at 7:25

3 Answers 3

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I don't know about Netgear. HP Procurves are great. They have a free lifetime warranty with next business day replacement, free firmware upgrades, and free phone support. Our 5406zl's have been rock solid for over 3 years. I would not hesitate to buy or recommend HP Procurve.

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Netgear's higher end offerings are still more in the prosumer/SMB realm than the true high-end switch realm. If you have the coin to drop on ProCurve hardware, you won't regret it in the long run.

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It's not even close. Netgear runs the range of SOHO to ProSumer. HP runs from ProSumer to Enterprise Datacenter. ProCurve only lightly competes in core switching with Cisco and Juniper, but it's professional grade equipment all the way.

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