On a somewhat different topic, I’m interested in upgrading my (home) wired network from 1GbE to 10GbE at least between some prime machines. I’ve got Cat-6 in the walls (generally two to each room) which should be good enough for 5GbE each at least (if the switch supports multi gig), and I’ve done some research into multiGig switches I can put into my network closet to act as a hub (e.g., Netgear XS512EM, 12-port managed). I currently have a 24-port 1GbE Netgear but it saturates during backups (even though I stagger them it’s getting to the point they can’t get all done at night and I don’t want to intrude on streaming and netsurfing during the day :-0).
What I haven’t been able to find are relatively inexpensive replacements for the switches I have in the offices: right now I use Netgear GS108’s but I’m looking to replace them with something that can do multi-gig to local machines with a pair of 5GbE uplinks to the network closet (the fastest machines can do 10GbE, e.g. recent Mac minis and iMacs so I think I can eliminate the backup time issue with enough bandwidth). So far all I’ve found are unmanaged switches which don’t have port aggregation. Or they’re $400 each (e.g. Netgear XS505M), which is prohibitive given I’ll have to buy several of them (plus the XS505M is huge compared to the GS108 making placement an issue).
Pulling new cable probably isn’t in the picture (if I could, link aggregation wouldn’t be needed). Other than to the server closet, the ceilings are all drywalled. (I can/will pull cat-7/8 (or maybe fiber if I get ambitious, I think everything has SFP+ these days) to the server from the network closet, though it’s close enough to the network closet (< 25m as the cable runs) it might do 10GbE over cat 6 so I figured I’d wait).
Any suggestions or other ideas appreciated; I can post a more complete description of the network topology if it helps, but it’s basically a tree.