Hi Experts,
My company is moving to a new building and I'm looking at upgrading our switches at the same time. Right now we have 2 48 port 3COM Superstack3 4500 10/100 switches connecting 25 pcs and 10 servers.
We will be increasing the number of pcs to 50-75 within the next year and our new building will have a new phone system with IP enabled phones. For the phones we are going to buy a POE 10/100 switch, but for the rest of the network I'm looking for a recommendation on whether to upgrade to gigabit switches or not.
I'm looking at the Powerconnect 5448 here:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/data_center_gig?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
The 10/100 switch is about half the price.
About half the servers and pcs have gigabit nics in them (we will probably upgrade the nics in the servers if we go with gigabit) and in the future all new pcs and servers I'm sure will have gig nics.
Should we see a noticable performance increase if we do upgrade to the gigabit switches?
Any other recommendations for the configuration or brand of switch?
The cabling run throughout the building is CAT5e.
You should at least put a gigibit switch at the core of your network where the servers reside, and put 10/100 for the access portion of your network going to the workstation. Most 10/100 switches have gigabit uplinks that can run to your core gigabit switches.