What switch should I be looking for?

[Kooch]

I'm replacing a couple of unmanaged switches at our data center and would like suggestions as to what to buy.

The first switch sits outside the firewall and basically just accepts all the traffic from the web and passes it on. The only reason it exists is to provide redundancy by switching over to the second of two fiber lines coming in in case of failure. We generally have about 4500 concurrent connections at any given time, and my main concern here would just be throughput. I don't care about filtering anything here or even really looking at what's coming in.

The second switch that needs replacing sits just after the firewall and distributes traffic to the various groups of web servers (about forty five total). Currently we have separate load balancing appliances to further sort traffic, but I'm curious as to how well HP's higher end switches could handle this.

I'd like to get a pair of both for failover so that needs to be supported.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to buy \ what to avoid? We want to remain with HP equipment across the board.

Thanks.

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

For the first switch you don't need to know about concurrent connections, you need to know about throughput - both packets per second and bits per second.
Then pick a switch that covers you.

for the second switch, you need to decide whether to go with
- 2x 48-port switches (eg 3500, 2910, 2810) depending on whether you need layer3, 10Gb ports, etc...
- a chassis switch. 8212 would be overkill, so you'd be looking at 5406zl