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What brand Fiber Switch to buy?

We have a warehouse site with 5 warehouses, an office, and a couple of other buildings. I am wanting to improve our network design by adding a backbone switch and connecting all the switches through it rather than daisy chaining them from one building to the next. I am looking for a switch with just fiber ports, about 8. We have SC connectors on most of our equipment.

I am having trouble finding this item. Everything I find seems to be modular and only support 10Mb or 100Mb modules, or they are like 21,000 dollars. Does anyone have a recommendation on a brand or a model that is cost effective and will do the job?

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Sniper98G

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dbestcomputers

ASKER

Oh wow, that wasn't what I expected. I definitely don't want to skimp and get a cheapy if it won't work properly, but that is well over my price range. I appreciate your help though. Do you think that's probably the only solution? What happened is I worried the admin at the warehouses when we were talking about the number of switches repeaters, etc you can have in a network. Now he's afraid of latency issues, even though their aren't any at the present time and right now he's not exceeding the maximum number of chained switches.

Sniper98G

If you are willing to go with 100Mb the price would drop significantly. But with gig even if you went with a cheaper brand like 3com it would still be about $4,000 plus SFPs.

dbestcomputers

ASKER

OK, I understand. I had seen some Black Box brand products that were really cost-effective, but only offered 10 and 100 Mbit connections. It just doesn't seem very efficient for the backbone of the network to run at only 100Mbit. Right now there are 3 or 4 switches daisy-chained with Gbit fiber hookups, do you think that is more efficient?

That's the last question, I promise. You can have the points after that :)

Sniper98G

If it's only 4 switches I would stick with the daisy chain. To put it into perspective; Cisco's recommended network diameter (the maximum distance between switches) is 7. If you go beyond that then you should probably think about redesigning your network.

dbestcomputers

ASKER

Thank you for your help. I do appreciate the straight-forward answers.