we are going with a hosted phone solution and are in need of new switches for our company. a little background about our current system is:
landscape architecture firm
3 offices (125 users) - 1HQ (100 users), 2 remote offices (about 10 users/each office)
watchguard firewalls running ipsec vpn site to site tunnels in mesh topology
3com switches (3870, and 4500g)
3com fabric 7754 in server room
i have been reading up on some of the different switches available from cisco and have narrowed it down two i think (2960, 3750), but not sure what i need for sure. i am leading towards one but i have a feeling it will be a hard sell with my IT director due to the cost per switch. i am looking at possibly getting 16 switches if i can get my way. . my goal is to purchase switches to support the new phone system, plus i really want to redo our current switching infrastructure by replacing all switches with new cisco ones. one reason i want to do this is i want to do a stackable configuration which has built in redundancy, plus the ease of management in a stackable config is really appealing to me. right now i have so many switches and its annoying to have to manage them all individually. do i need layer 3 switching, or will layer 2 suffice for data & voip? is there a performance difference between the two? we dont currently run any vlans but that could change in the near future. right now i was debating between the catalyst 2960, 3560, adn 3750 switches. i removed the 3560 because its not stackable. i spoke with one cisco rep and he told me to forget the 2960 as well, which left me with the 3750.
is there a reason why i should not consider looking at the 2960? in regards to the 3750 i am not sure which model i should be looking at. i have looked at the comparision model chart but still not sure. i think i might recommend the WS-C3750X-48PF-S switch. i need 48 port, POE+ on all ports with SFP 1gig uplinks with the option to upgrade to 10gig in the near future. i also like the stackwise/stackpower features. i am also looking at the borderless network technology but not sure what the hardware requirements are for that. is that available in the 2960 or just the 3750 models?
any help would be great. we are sitting down to figure out what we need tomorrow. right now i am thinking we need the WS-C3750X-48PF-S model
what would be a good comparable replacement to a 3com fabric 7754 data center switch? if implementing borderless networking does everything have to be cisco products (routers, switches)?
if i left anything out please let me know and i will do my best to answer your question.
thanks
