I enjoy buying used enterprise gear because a) it’s cheaper than most other networking gear and 2) because it’s enterprise I usually don’t have to worry about overpowering the equipment with my home setup.

I’m looking at used 10gb switches on ebay for less than $200 but find that even though there are plenty of options they’re either vastly too complicated, like blade switches, or require licenses and I’m not that familiar with enterprise equipment to know if I’ll need a license which I don’t want to pay for or deal with.

I’ve looked at the dell z9000, dell force10 s4810p and the cisco n5k-c5548p which I understand needs a license so will probably be crossed out. I know that Mikrotik has some decently priced 10gb switches for $200~ that has 8 sfp+ ports, so that’s a last option I suppose.

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Does anyone know anything about the z9000 or the s4810p? Any recommendations for other cheap enterprise 10gb switches? I liked that the dell units also had some ports for 40gb but the 10gb is more realistic for now. I also like dell networking in general.

  • Protocol73@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I recently picked up a couple 10/40G switches I am enjoying so far.

    • Arista 7050S-64-R [$160]
    • Dell X4012 [$150]

    I have two of the 7050’s in top of rack service:

    They are tolerably loud after boot up, {boot is LOUD}
    But they are not much over the Dell 12th & 13th Gen server’s once running. {Rack is in basement & can’t hear it from upstairs}

    Also have these working with cheap 40G LR optics for sub 2km links!
    AOI QSFP+ 40G-LR4 Lite

    The X4012’s are great if you only want/need a few 10G ports & quiet.
    They are managed, but don’t to anything too crazy/fancy.
    Had a Proxmox Cluster using one for a while (with Intel X520’s) & never had any issues.

    Also tried these, but they are way to loud:

    • Dell S5000 ( great modular switch but needs to be in a data center)
    • Cisco N5K-C5596UP (not as bad as the Dell, but loud)