My finding for a used, high quality PoE switch. 24/48-Port | Gigabit | PoE+ | 390w for around $100

[elwood]

First and foremost, i'd like to thank @giomania for collecting and maintaining such an informative spreadsheet as well as all the contributors of the PoE Switch Suggestion list!. Until recently i didn't know very much about PoE switches or PoE standards in general. After extensively going down the rabbit hole and googling just about every new and used model on the list, i slowly started to get a grasp on PoE overall, what was and wasn't currently available, and honed my limited knowledge as well as my personal list of requirements that i wanted in a PoE switch. The extensive collection of PoE models with their detailed specifications, links, notes, and posts played a pivotal role in leading me to finding a switch that met my particular list of requirements. I had a hard time finding anything available that met my requirements and staying within my frugal budget. The models that were/are available left me having to compromise in some way and i wasn't easily willing to. It seems that the availability of some of the older budget models might be starting to dry up. At least the ones I was concentrated on.

I did eventually end up finding and buying the Brocade ICX6430-24P. An enterprise-grade, 24 ports of gigabit PoE+ power, managed, quiet, lowish idle power consumption, and within my price range.

Some impressive (at least to me, for the price) specs from the ICX6430-24P/48P data sheet:

• Enterprise grade with a MTBF of 505,469 hours (over 57years!)
• 24 or 48 1GBe ports of af/at PoE+
• 390w of PoE power budget
• 39.2 dBA - replacement fans available to lower this or even fanless, depending on load
• 9w draw at idle (ICX 6430-24P)
• GUI management via browser (a serial console cable is likely needed for initial setup/config unless the seller does this beforehand for you. NOTE: I don't believe GUI access nor PoE power is turned on in the default/factory settings)
• Rack-mountable
• License-free
• Comparably inexpensive

For me, the ICX series exceeds my requirements and was an easy choice compared to the other used options currently readily available. I found quite a few noisy, complicated, license required (which may or may not be readily available for free or even at a cost), power-hungry, heat producing enterprise switches in the $100-150 price range. The ICX hands down came out on top for me. If you're strictly looking to power PoE IP cameras though, a 10/100mbps switch may be all that you need and may be a bit cheaper. I'm not 100% sure but i don't believe there are many gigabit IP cams out there, if any. A used HP Procurve can likely be found a bit cheaper than any ICX if you don't need PoE+ or GBe. These HP's seem to be some of the most efficient switches out there, quiet, low power consumption and heat output. Looks like there's a handful of J9137A's for well under $50 on ebay right now if you're only needing 8-ports.

The 24-port (ICX 6430-24P) and 48-port (ICX 6430-48P) versions can both be found on ebay for around $100 shipped. If you're looking for more power and routing options, the 6450's are available for a bit more and offer Layer 3 routing, optional 10GBe uplinks, and a ton of other features I currently know nothing about. The 6450-48P has 780w of PoE budget! I ended up buying the ICX 6430-24P with included rack mounting brackets for a total of $109.08 ($75 + $27.55 shipping + $6.53 tax).

This thread has all the info needed for the entire ICX line as well as firmware files and installation/configuration guides that are easy to follow. If you can install and configure Blue Iris, you can likely configure one of these and have one of the cheapest, most overkill PoE switches available and won't have to worry about running out of power or ports, hopefully. As a recommendation from someone somewhere i can't remember at the moment, i used this USB/serial cable for the initial firmware installation and configuration. The driver installed automatically under Win10 and it worked flawlessly for me. Once you install the firmware and configure a few things, all other configuration and maintenance afterwards can be done via the GUI over a browser or SSH/Telnet, i believe.

If you didn't know, you can power nearly any device that accepts DC power (up to 30W) through a barrel connector or USB with a single cat5e (or better) cable and a PoE splitter such as these: Gigabit 1.35 x 3.5mm barrel/microUSB | Gigabit USB-C | Gigabit 2.1mm x 5.5mm barrel, etc. I'm using the linked PoE Texas to power and connect a IP4M-1041 with no issues. I can recommend this particular splitter and you should check out PoE Texas' for a plethora of other ideas and gadgets if you're looking to get more out of your switch and reduce some power consumption and cable clutter. The others are just examples but they should work. You can get rid of your very inefficient wall warts, reduce cable clutter, and have ability to cycle power remotely on each individual device connected. If you're interested in that sort of thing.

I'm not claiming to be an expert, far from it. There may be a better or cheaper option out there that fits your needs better than this. This is just what i came up with after a few days/weeks of searching and research. Hopefully this can help someone out if they're looking for something similar without spending days wading through all the options.

 

[The Automation Guy]

ServeTheHome is a great site to learn about networking. I went through this same process a couple of years ago and ended up with a couple of Aruba S2500-48P switches. Like the Brocade they don't require any licenses for full functionality (something you need to be sure of before you buy). SHT has a long thread on these Aruba switches as well. The Brocades came into popularity shortly after the Aruba's.

Enjoy the new switch!

 

[IAmATeaf]

Important detail missing how much did it cost?

 

[Teken]

Important detail missing how much did it cost?

If he bought it for less than $200.XX that's a win if all of the information provided up above is true. Feature rich, energy efficient, high power handling, quiet.

 

[elwood]

Important detail missing how much did it cost?

I went with the ICX 6430-24P with included rack mounting brackets, it was $109.08 total ($75 + $27.55 shipping + $6.53 tax). Looks like there's a handful of 48-port 6430-48p's for $95 shipped on ebay at the moment.

 

[Teken]

I went with the ICX 6430-24P with included rack mounting brackets, it was $109.08 total ($75 + $27.55 shipping + $6.53 tax). Looks like there's a handful of 48-port 6430-48p's for $95 shipped on ebay at the moment.

Only $20.XX more and you could have had double the ports and power!

 

[elwood]

Only $20.XX more and you could have had double the ports and power!

Believe me, i stressed over which one to get for a while. In the end I went with the 24-port for lower idle draw, less heat generation, and less noise. If i ever run out of ports, i'll just get another one or whatever is equivalent, cheap, and available at the time.

Edit: I still need to run a separate router/wireless combo for wifi and it's currently handling all my wired, non-PoE devices. I'll continue to use that along with this switch so I don't really see myself using up 24 PoE ports in the near future unless i get really creative! Which could happen but i'll worry about that later!

 

[Teken]

believe me, i stressed over which one to get for a while. In the end I went with the 24-port for lower idle draw, less heat generation, and less noise. If i ever run out of ports, i'll just get another one or whatever is equivalent, cheap, and available at the time.

Trust me, I get, it as I've been on a energy management & energy monitoring journey for more than 35 years. Nothing is worse to know a switch with nothing connected and just at idle consumes 100 watts! The vast majority of those inefficient (Green / Energy Star) switches continue to live a second life in peoples homes.

At 9 watts for yours that's a far cry from those power hungry monsters chewing up 50~100 watts - congrats!

 

[elwood]

Trust me, I get, it as I've been on a energy management & energy monitoring journey for more than 35 years. Nothing is worse to know a switch with nothing connected and just at idle consumes 100 watts! The vast majority of those inefficient (Green / Energy Star) switches continue to live a second life in peoples homes.

At 9 watts for yours that's a far cry from those power hungry monsters chewing up 50~100 watts - congrats!

I'd also hate to see the combined usage of all the wall wart/power bricks i have plugged up, some without anything connected! There's definitely a future project coming to eliminate those.

 

[Teken]

I'd also hate to see the combined usage of all the wall wart/power bricks i have plugged up, some without anything connected! There's definitely a future project coming to eliminate those.

Good for you, as one of the best things about POE is being able to centralize and power everything via POE. The greatest creation in the 21st century in my mind as it relates to networking was POE adapters. I've been on a slow march to remove as many wall warts from the home.

Going this route freed up outlets, visual eye sore, allows central management, and redundant power. I've kept a few things on wall warts / power bricks as those specific appliances can't be integrated with POE for security (isolation) reasons.

 

[elwood]

Good for you, as one of the best things about POE is being able to centralize and power everything via POE. The greatest creation in the 21st century in my mind as it relates to networking was POE adapters. I've been on a slow march to remove as many wall warts from the home.

Going this route freed up outlets, visual eye sore, allows central management, and redundant power. I've kept a few things on wall warts / power bricks as those specific appliances can't be integrated with POE for security (isolation) reasons.

The pic looks looks like my near future! Just curious, couldn't you isolate the devices via separate VLANs? Also, how are you handling multiple devices in one area and future-proofing for possible additional devices in the future? Something i been thinking about, i have some ethernet runs already in place (mostly single ports, 1 or 2 doubles) but if i'm going to start eliminating wall warts i'll need 1-3 more runs per location. I thought about just replacing my single & double keystones with 6-port plates and be done with it. The slight extra cost is worth not having to redo things or try to fish a single, additional run in the future.

It would be neat if an active splitter was available to power multiple devices that only require power and not connectivity as well, from a single run.

 

[Teken]

The pic looks looks like my near future! Just curious, couldn't you isolate the devices via separate VLANs? Also, how are you handling multiple devices in one area and future-proofing for possible additional devices in the future? Something i been thinking about, i have some ethernet runs already in place (mostly single ports, 1 or 2 doubles) but if i'm going to start eliminating wall warts i'll need 1-3 more runs per location. I thought about just replacing my single & double keystones with 6-port plates and be done with it. The slight extra cost is worth not having to redo things or try to fish a single, additional run in the future.

It would be neat if an active splitter was available to power multiple devices that only require power and not connectivity as well, from a single run.

You and I are walking the same path at different times my friend! I've spent most of this past summer running more dedicated CAT-6, CAT6A, CAT-7, CAT-8, and Fiber throughout the home. Truth be told almost every area, floor, zone had a ethernet drop when I built my custom home more than 13 years ago.

I honestly thought all of the preplanning and wiring I'd done was enough.

What changed all of that was obviously more IoT, and network related hardware not present in the past. As noted early on the biggest change came from wanting to centralize and power as many things I could via POE. So, that of course required multiple pulls of wire to the same location where there were only 2-4.

Now, almost every location has a minim of six keystone ports to twelve.

As it relates to your question about powering multiple devices in my personal environment there is enough ports to attach all of the current and future devices. I'm not a real fan of adding multiple pieces of hardware on a single line but if something only required power a simple Y splitter in whatever variety could be used. Given, the smallest switches are POE+ 500 watts there's no problem powering any device in the home.

Your questions about VLAN's . . .

Every isolated network uses all of the industry best practices of VLAN's, Port isolation, DHCP Snooping, Radius, most commonly known as port security & port based authentication (AAA). The problem is and reason for the four independent and isolated networks is there are just some IoT devices that don't operate well or at all when any of the above is enforced. As such, the easiest thing to do (even more time consuming and expansive) was to prop up another isolated network to handle only those chatty and IoT devices which run on a completely separate (ISP) Internet connection.

This area only had a dual port and has since been upgraded with twelve. Four dedicated optical fiber lines were run to this location.

In the garage and some other locations I installed dedicated POE+ (at) & POE++ (bt) ports for a big project in the works. The red ports are the dedicated POE++ (bt) ports for easy identification and use.

In the living room there was only a dual jack and have since installed two 6 port jacks. I don't ever foresee needing twelve POE jacks but there's plenty of space to install more if need be! What's missing in this photo is the heat shrink alphanumeric ID labels on each cable. As I ran out and had to go through the chore of re-terminating a perfectly working panel just to insure they were all labeled correctly!

I don't remember what I did or ate yesterday. For sure won't know what a blue, yellow, green, black, purple cable does later!

 

[DownTheRabbitHole]

Just getting into setting up a security system and there is so much to take in...software...cameras...networking...NVR vs. BI...it's a bit overwhelming. I found your post very helpful and just ordered a Brocade ICX6430-48P 48-Port PoE+ and wanted to thank you for taking the time to share what you learned.

 

[DownTheRabbitHole]

If anyone else is interested there is a helpful FAQ at

https://www.dataswitchworks.com/datasheets/brocade-icx-6400-series-faq.pdf

 

[user8963]

You and I are walking the same path at different times my friend! I've spent most of this past summer running more dedicated CAT-6, CAT6A, CAT-7, CAT-8, and Fiber throughout the home. Truth be told almost every area, floor, zone had a ethernet drop when I built my custom home more than 13 years ago.

I honestly thought all of the preplanning and wiring I'd done was enough.

What changed all of that was obviously more IoT, and network related hardware not present in the past. As noted early on the biggest change came from wanting to centralize and power as many things I could via POE. So, that of course required multiple pulls of wire to the same location where there were only 2-4.

Now, almost every location has a minim of six keystone ports to twelve.

As it relates to your question about powering multiple devices in my personal environment there is enough ports to attach all of the current and future devices. I'm not a real fan of adding multiple pieces of hardware on a single line but if something only required power a simple Y splitter in whatever variety could be used. Given, the smallest switches are POE+ 500 watts there's no problem powering any device in the home.

Your questions about VLAN's . . .

Every isolated network uses all of the industry best practices of VLAN's, Port isolation, DHCP Snooping, Radius, most commonly known as port security & port based authentication (AAA). The problem is and reason for the four independent and isolated networks is there are just some IoT devices that don't operate well or at all when any of the above is enforced. As such, the easiest thing to do (even more time consuming and expansive) was to prop up another isolated network to handle only those chatty and IoT devices which run on a completely separate (ISP) Internet connection.

This area only had a dual port and has since been upgraded with twelve. Four dedicated optical fiber lines were run to this location.

In the garage and some other locations I installed dedicated POE+ (at) & POE++ (bt) ports for a big project in the works. The red ports are the dedicated POE++ (bt) ports for easy identification and use.

In the living room there was only a dual jack and have since installed two 6 port jacks. I don't ever foresee needing twelve POE jacks but there's plenty of space to install more if need be! What's missing in this photo is the heat shrink alphanumeric ID labels on each cable. As I ran out and had to go through the chore of re-terminating a perfectly working panel just to insure they were all labeled correctly!

I don't remember what I did or ate yesterday. For sure won't know what a blue, yellow, green, black, purple cable does later!

who needs so many gigabit ports at one spot ..

in wall adapter gives wifi and 4port switch, but only 1G uplink .. i hope they will make 2.5G possible soon

 

[bp2008]

That sounds really good. The backbone of my network is a Mikrotik with 24x gigabit ports and 2x SFP+ (10 GbE), and no PoE. It cost around $135. Then a separate 4 port SFP+ switch for another $135 or so. And of course I had to add a separate small PoE switch for the access point and 1 camera (soon to be 2) that I power from there. All the switches are fanless, which is nice, but it is not a very clean layout having 3 separate switches in one place! And I am nearly out of gigabit ports!

I always have concerns with used enterprise gear:

1. Poor energy-efficiency and fan noise.
2. They may have weird compatibility issues (with fiber transceivers for example).
3. Configuration may be primarily command-line over serial connection. Yuck!!

Case in point, Aruba S2500-48P looks like a wonderful option with 48x gigabit PoE ports, PoE+ support, 4x SFP+ slots for 10 GbE, $110 shipped. But people say the 24 port version of that switch draws 50 watts at idle with nothing connected. That is laughable. The 48 port version has to be worse. Then there's no telling how bad the efficiency and noise might get with a bunch of ports loaded on the 48 port model especially. Hard pass from me.

Really, if I tried to "upgrade" to that switch, it would probably more than double the power consumption of the network gear in my server room, and take it from silent to noisy, all in the name of having fewer switches.

 

[bp2008]

Now I'm reading about the Brocade ICX 6450-48P, but apparently it is 52 watts with nothing connected. The guy who posted that said he'd edit his post with more information once he got things plugged in, but of course he forgot to do so.

 

[user8963]

Now I'm reading about the Brocade ICX 6450-48P, but apparently it is 52 watts with nothing connected.

quite normal for these switches
this stuff is so old, thats why its cheep. no one want it anymore


they are jets when starting.

todays PoE switches only use around 10-20w + poe devices
cisco have a fanless series (only up to 24ports)

Cisco Catalyst 2960-L Switches Offer Fanless at 195W PoE Power

With up to 48 PoE ports delivering up to 195W of power the Cisco Catalyst 2960-L series of SMB switches has a great set of capabilities. Virtually every model of the new line is fanless as well to aid in workplace deployments

www.servethehome.com

this is a winner

or use passive poe injector without fan and fanless managed switch

 

[Teken]

quite normal for these switches
this stuff is so old, thats why its cheep. no one want it anymore

also @Teken mention they are quite LOL
they are jets when starting.

todays PoE switches only use around 10-20w + poe devices
cisco have a fanless series (only up to 24ports)

Cisco Catalyst 2960-L Switches Offer Fanless at 195W PoE Power

With up to 48 PoE ports delivering up to 195W of power the Cisco Catalyst 2960-L series of SMB switches has a great set of capabilities. Virtually every model of the new line is fanless as well to aid in workplace deployments

www.servethehome.com

this is a winner

Every switch that's designed for enterprise use is extremely loud upon first start up. A jet plane is the best example to describe the incredible noise they generate. Now, whether that same switch will ramp back down to a more reasonable level is entirely up to the time frame it was designed, brand, and model of switch in use.

I migrated away from Aruba, Cisco, Brocade, and others in large part because of the standby power consumption. Next was the steady ambient noise each of these switches made. Depending upon which one each had a unique sound that based on a measured (dB meter) either were the same (sound) output but sounded much louder to the human ear.

That was in large part due to the frequency those fans generated from a soft whirling hum to what best can be describe as constant droning noise!

I upgraded my entire network with Ubiquity hardware in large part again due to the lower standby power consumption. The obvious bonus was the fact the POE switches ramped up and down based on temperature / load. 99% of the time there is absolutely no noise coming out of the dozen switches which satisfies my energy management and goal of a quiet home.

Everyone will need to find what is acceptable to them . . .

When you break more than five network appliances never mind 25+ energy consumption, tight integration, and low noise is a must!

 

[Moonville]

I also have the Brocade ICX 6430-24P. Which port connects to the BI PC?

Is it the console port ( |O|O ) or any of the 24 ports? There's also an "Out-of-band management port (Ethernet symbol)"