HP 1820-24G-PoE+ (185W) Switch (J9983A)

I love these switches for the use case I have for them.I have them installed in a ~80 person office that had limited existing cabling. On move-in we didn't have the time to install enough cabling to give each seating position the two ports connected directly to our core switch stack that I prefer.Instead, we installed enough cabling to have each 8-position desk pod have three Cat6e drops tie back in to the main server/networking room. I have these switches set up to tie in to the central stack with a 2-port aggregated gigabit link. Individual desktops and phones connect to these switches which in turn backhaul to the main switch stack.Our use case is mainly providing access to SAAS web tools and applications, and this setup has plenty of bandwidth for that. If the individual machines were pushing out huge network transactions like file/printing/editing services, it probably wouldn't work as well.All the switches in the office are HP, but this switch uses standard protocols for link aggregation, so you should be able to do LAG backhauls to any other switch that supports non-proprietary LAGs.

I was looking for a gigabit PoE switch that was also as quiet as possible. I needed the ability to configure VLANs, needed link aggregation and a few other managed switch features. I wanted something that I knew would be rock solid reliable.This 1820 switch exceeds my expectations.Let's start off with PoE. Gigabit switches that provide PoE to more than a few ports are almost always super noisy, which for me is a real problem as unfortunately the switch must be installed in a small rack near an area where people work. This is not a problem with this switch. It can provide up to almost 200 watts of power and the fan is barely audible. I actually have to put my ear up to the vent on the switch to hear the fan operating when it is providing power to 5 security cameras and putting out about 25 watts of PoE. I expect it will get noisier if the maximum power budget is being used but it's very impressive to have this super low noise level in a gigabit PoE switch that has a 185 watt budget..Onto the switch itself, setup is pretty much a breeze using the built in web management tools. I never had any trouble configuring things with the web interface, I'm not sure if there is also a CLI option. I was able to set up a couple of additional VLANs (phones and security cameras) and get link aggregation configured for a server. All in about 15 minutes. The switch warns you to save the configuration since it will clear after a reboot. Everything was super easy to set up if you have any familiarity with networks.For a consumer who just wants a high performance gigabit switch with PoE to power up some security cameras, etc, all you would have to do is simply rack this switch and plug everything in. Out of the box it will do that. For a network person who wants to configure some of the more advanced things, this switch makes it easy to do. The only "gotcha" is that the switch did not get DHCP address from my router and I had to change the IP on my laptop to get into its default address of 192.168.1.1. After that it was smooth sailing.Be aware that the switch only supplies power on 12 of the ethernet ports. This is pretty clear in all of the technical literature about the product, but I'm sure someone will buy it to run all 24 ports and get huffy that it does not. The switch has slots to put GBIC modules in so that you can daisy chain multiple switches together over long distances with fiber.Switch is just a bit spendier than some of the real budget options out there, but this is the newest generation procurve switch and if its predecessors are any indication it will be a tank. It has a "mean time to failure" of something like 80 years and HP offers a lifetime warranty on it. Very hard to find any fault with it whatsoever other than the marginally higher asking price.I'm now planning on getting a couple of the 8 port models of this switch (which can power over PoE so that you don't need to use a wall adapter) to expand the network a bit.

good price, fast delivery and the switch works as advertized. great small business switch when you need a few ports of POE for things like security cameras and such.