I know many (most) of the folks here are outside .us, and availability on this stuff is likely best within .us, but the folks at servethehome.com have put together a pretty nice guide on used Brocade ICX switches–seems like some quite nice gear, at quite reasonable prices. I have one on the way (should be here tomorrow), and if it works as well as it sounds like it should, I’ll pick up another for my server room–that one should replace four individual switches I have out there now:
Brocade ICX Series (cheap & powerful 10gbE/40gbE switching) | ServeTheHome Forums
Nice article - quite interesting, especially with the power consumption and the noise warnings!
My 2 cents
Andy
The ICX6450-48P I ordered from eBay arrived this afternoon. First impressions are good–it has double the ports of my Dell PowerConnect 5524P (with PoE+ to all of them) and is quieter. The web management console is as awful as promised, but the CLI seems usable (even to me, a complete n00b), and SSH public key authentication was easy enough to set up once I’d converted my public key to SSH2 format (ssh-keygen -e -f id_rsa.pub > ssh2_key will do the trick). Just be sure to have a RJ45 serial console cable on hand, which I did due to the Dell units I already had.
I do think I’ll move ahead with the 6610 I’d been eyeing for my server room–that will replace a Dell X1052, two Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN, and a Unifi USW-Lite-8-POE. I don’t really care about noise there, and collapsing all that into a single unit should simplify administration.
Note: The screw holes in the rack ears were too small for my 6mm mounting screws. But that was easy to fix with a drill and a few minutes.
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