switch options Unifi Araknis Pakedge etc

[tonysss13]

I have been using 4 x Cisco SG500's . two POE versions in a wall cabinet & 2 non poe in two cabinets with AV equipment in. However I have been having network issues for a while now and am considering swapping them out. For instance my C4 panelized lighting will not reconnect to the network after a power outage, so I have had to connect the panels straight to the router (Draytek) to fix this. Also Sky Q has on occasion frozen my network although seems ok lately

I am considering Araknis 210 or 310 or pakedge SX as they seem to play nicely with C4 and there are used ones available for decent prices one bay (uk based), however all my cabling comes back to a 48 bay patch panel so I need front patching switch on the wall cabinet whch seems more common with araknis. rear patching on the cabinets is fine but there is more pakedge stuff available on ebay. I don't use VLAN's currently but may wish to do so in the future so would they play together nicely if mix & matched?

The other thing that has got my interest is the standard 48 POE Unifi as it is front patching and is shallow enough to fit into my wall cabinet (i had to use 2 x 24 sg 500 as the 48 is too deep)  However I read they sometimes don't work well with C4? I also have unifi AP's which have been great as long as not connected to the ciscos. I also like the idea of managing them in one interface, like the stacked SG500's ahich i guess will not be possible with Araknis or Pakedge

Any comments / suggestions appreciated

thanks

[ekohn00]

4 hours ago, tonysss13 said:

I have been using 4 x Cisco SG500's . two POE versions in a wall cabinet & 2 non poe in two cabinets with AV equipment in. However I have been having network issues for a while now and am considering swapping them out. For instance my C4 panelized lighting will not reconnect to the network after a power outage, so I have had to connect the panels straight to the router (Draytek) to fix this. Also Sky Q has on occasion frozen my network although seems ok lately

I am considering Araknis 210 or 310 or pakedge SX as they seem to play nicely with C4 and there are used ones available for decent prices one bay (uk based), however all my cabling comes back to a 48 bay patch panel so I need front patching switch on the wall cabinet whch seems more common with araknis. rear patching on the cabinets is fine but there is more pakedge stuff available on ebay. I don't use VLAN's currently but may wish to do so in the future so would they play together nicely if mix & matched?

The other thing that has got my interest is the standard 48 POE Unifi as it is front patching and is shallow enough to fit into my wall cabinet (i had to use 2 x 24 sg 500 as the 48 is too deep)  However I read they sometimes don't work well with C4? I also have unifi AP's which have been great as long as not connected to the ciscos. I also like the idea of managing them in one interface, like the stacked SG500's ahich i guess will not be possible with Araknis or Pakedge

Any comments / suggestions appreciated

thanks

love my unifi!

personally if you're going to do it yourself and manage it yourself because you have the knowledge, I felt the unifi was the best bang for the $$.

[Cranky Oldman]

for what it's worth, I'll share my experience buying an older Pakedge SX-24P on eBay to expand my network.  The main reason I picked Pakedge was because it has the network ports on the back of the unit, just like the Araknis switches and router that my Control4 dealer sold me, so it fits into an empty slot on the same rack without looking strange.  The Pakedge is working fine but one thing I hadn't anticipated is that the LED's, both front and rear, are blue and very, very bright.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn them off from the UI (unlike my much-newer Araknis switches that allow LED's to be turned off).  My rack is in a closet next to a room where I watch TV, and the bright blue pulsing light from the Pakedge switch finds its way under the door, which is super annoying when you're trying to watch something in a dark room.  I could block the light by filling the gap at the bottom of the door but that gap is there to let some ventilation air into the closet.  So I ended up covering the Pakedge LED's with black tape which was time consuming.  Also I wasn't smart enough to think about rack ears when I went shopping for a switch on eBay.  Lots of switches are sold with rack ears, but not the one I bought... doh!  So I had to buy those separately and it probably took me at least an hour to figure out exactly what size and hole spacing was needed and then to find a matching set on Amazon, wait a couple of days for delivery, and install them.  More time was consumed troubleshooting a problem getting a secure https: connection to work with the Pakedge.  Browsers report "ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH".  I Googled that and found a couple of suggested workarounds, but bottom line is the switch doesn't correctly support modern SSL standards.  It's not a big issue on a private network, but it's one more thing that sucked up some time and made me start to regret my purchase.  Also you mentioned VLAN's and wondered about mixing and matching brands in that context:  well, I have 5 VLAN's running, and I didn't have any real problems with getting the Pakedge to work with them, but I definitely lost some time -- maybe 1/2 hour -- on the learning curve because the Pakedge method of configuring VLAN's was sufficiently different from the Araknis method that I made a couple of little missteps along the way.  I'm retired so the "time is money" axiom doesn't really apply, but certainly if I was on the clock I would have been further ahead to buy a brand new "expensive" Araknis and have it work immediately, vs. this "cheap" used Pakedge that ate up many hours dealing with the issues described above.  YMMV!