On 1/30/12 9:12 PM, Harald St?rzebecher wrote: > > What happens if one switch fails? Can the remaining equipment do some > useful work until a replacement arrives? > Depending on the answers it might be better to have two or more > smaller stackable switches instead of one big switch, even if the big > one might be cheaper. Or just run two totally independent switches and either support two different L3 networks, or setup bonded interfaces which connected to each switch. If you lose a switch, then you can continue to function without a service interruption. > I just looked at the Netgear website and googled for prices: > Two Netgear GS724TS stackable switches seem to cost nearly the same as > one GS748TS, both are supposed to have "a 20 Gbps, dual-ring, highly > redundant stacking bus". The issue with most stacking switches is that you don't have any real redundancy without either doubling up on ports so each server is multi-homed into multiple switches, or having to manually move ports off a dead switch. Typically with a stacking configuration if you lose the 'master' switch the whole stack has to reboot which causes an outage.
