Managed or un-managed POE switch?

[Wizz 0]

I am deciding on a switch for a 4-5 camera PC based residential system using ACTi cameras. Are there any significant benefits going with a managed switch? Any POE switch recommendations?

 

Thanks kindly

[ssnapier 0]

Unless they have a very advanced home network with a domain controller or something crazy just go un-managed.

[mav 0]

I am deciding on a switch for a 4-5 camera PC based residential system using ACTi cameras. Are there any significant benefits going with a managed switch? Any POE switch recommendations?

 

Thanks kindly

You can remotely turn on/off the power to the various POE devices with a managed switch so you could use it as a remote reset.

 

That said, it's a pretty big premium for that feature. If you read through various threads you'll see a lot of recommendations around Zyxel and Cisco. TP-LINK has a cheap one too. The managed switches aren't cheap. Also, be aware that many of the 8 port POE switches only support 4 ports of POE.

[SectorSecurity 0]

Unless you know how to actually set up switching just go unmanaged, unless you have a need to create VLANS and trunks and advanced options like that.

[MR2 0]

here are what I'd consider positives to having a Managed switch(but not all these benefits are limited to Managed switch's)

 

1, you can web into it to see what's actually happening (so see what ports are in use, see how much power usage, see if there are any faults)

2, you can generally power cycle a port from the web interface

3, as the Managed units are more expensive, you're getting higher quality

4, Higher warranty, HP V1910 series switch's for example come with a LIFETIME warranty, and it's advanced replacement so you go through some bugfixing with them, if it fills the criteria they just send another and you send the faulty unit back...

5, a good portion of Managed switch's (and many un-managed) are rack mount capable, so if you have a nice 19" rack cabinet in your home it will just slot straight in, beauuuutiful clean wiring.

6, plenty of Managed PoE switch's give you the ability to run Redundend power supplies, so if/when a surge takes out one of the power supplies, the switch keeps on running as if nothing happened on the second power supply

7, most of the 24+ port managed PoE switch's also have the ability to run an external booster power supply, so if the built in power supply can handle 250w of power, the external provides an additional 500w of power and you then have access to all 750w of PoE power (minus what the switch itself uses, which us generally 50-100w)

 

Stuff you probably won't use:

 

1, you can bond/team multiple ports, for example in the future you have 20mp camera's, 10 of them hanging off a switch, you're finding your single gigabit port to the server (a box with several 20tb SSD's for example) is getting close to it's limit, in the case of most of the NAS units you can click a few buttons and it will team the network connections to allow both to be used at once with the traffic split between them.

2, Vlan's, this is essentially separating out ports into groups that are, theoretically separate networks, I've never really seen the point to this, if your network is running out of IP's then just setup a new IP range on the same network (so if you are near 250 devices on 192.168.0.x, then add a network on 192.168.1.x you can dual bond IP's to most devices)

3, lots of odd setups for traffic management, honestly though, if you're getting that advanced you're probably going to be better spending on 10gig rather than fiddling with Gigabit.

 

 

this is no means a comprehensive list, just a quick rundown feel free to add to it.