Cisco Small Business SG300-28 Switch - SRW2024-K9

This is a great switch if you need a rack mount switch that is manageable and flexible.It can be a basic switch or it offers a lot of other features if your needs change in the future.I've used this countless times as a systems integrator and we've not had a single failure yet.

This switch is okay product too expensive switch compared with other models ...

Really great product at a value for the features it has. I have several enterprise cisco switches and the performance of the SG300 is on par with all of them for our needs.

I have purchased 4 of the Cisco 300-28 switches to date for different projects. I must say that I was a bit skeptical about not having a full IOS command line at first, but after using the web interface for a while, I got used to its quirks and flow.This switch has a lot going for it. Rich feature set, sturdiness, quiet operation (no fans!), performance and price are all things we love.As with any product though, there are things we don't love (as much). I knocked off a star for a handful of reasons:1. The firmware upgrade process. The main firmware image can be updated through the web interface but the boot loader must be done via TFTP. Certain versions of the firmware require specific boot loaders and Cisco's site does a poor job outlining the version dependencies. You have to read through the release notes to get this information (you probably should read these documents anyway). Thankfully, firmware upgrades aren't needed all that often.2. Switching from Layer 2 to Layer 3 or back to Layer 2 requires a reboot of the switch and this of course means downtime. If you envision yourself ever using Layer 3 features and don't mind the slight performance degradation, enable this feature shortly after unboxing the switch. The firmware version my units shipped with happened to lose their VLAN configuration when switching between the two modes.3. Power. These units only come with a single power supply configuration. We knew this from the start, so it's a gripe and not a product flaw. Do note that some of the units are shipping with the European-style power plug in the inner-box and a standard US plug (NEMA 5-15) in the outer box.Having said all of this, these are solid switches for those that require gigabit connectivity for small branch offices and workgroups. I hope you found this information useful!

Update after owning this switch for almost a year:First, it is commonly agreed among users of this switch that the GUI is consistently 'out of sync' with the state of the switch setup. This causes GUI hangs, lack of ability to configure certain settings, and the general need to try 3-5 times to set certain settings before the switch accepts the setting after hitting apply in the GUI. Of course much much googling is needed to understand this problem and how to deal with it once this switch is installed. The time wasted with this problem alone greatly exceeds any 'value' pricing offered by this switch.However, I learned to deal with the above, but as it turns out the switch is actually very unstable aside from the above issue. I have reloaded various versions of firmware, reset the switch every possible way, tried GUI, command line, and still I am unable to change most of the settings in my ACL list without either hanging the switch fully (requires power cycle to become active again) or sometimes when making these changes it turns out that all sorts of things stop working that are not obvious until users advise me they have no connection. This unstability is unpredictable with what will become disfunctional when changing ACL settings; the only predictable characteristic of this problem is that it has persisted for 6 months.Of course I would like to hardware warranty this switch, but it does not have a warranty from Cisco as bought from here. Sadly, this switch is going in the garbage can and I am now in the process of replacing all my Cisco small business hardware with another brand. I have very strong negative feelings toward Cisco and this line of switches as a result. Frankly, I have had more hardware problems with this switch than any expensive or cheap switch in my life.Great features and stability for the cost. I have experience with VLANs using TP-Link EasySmart switches (extremely basic VLANs for beginner applications) but had never played with a layer 3 switch nor anything Cisco branded before. In all, it took me around 5 hours to figure out how to set up Layer 3 vlans with appropriate firewall rules for 5 VLANs. It did then take me another 6 hours to figure out how to get static DHCP to work. In my case, I had to use wireshark to understand how to get my Windows 7 boxes to get a static IP address. Search "SG300-10 - DHCP Static DOES **NOT** work - assigment using MAC" for details. It then took me all day (>8 hours to find an upgrade path from the 2013 firmware that shipped on it to the latest version. See Cisco "Article ID: 5007" for the correct path, a huge time saver. Now that I understand the switch (took about 2 days to learn essential business setup, haven't tackled QOS yet), and have it configured well, I will definitely be buying more. I used this as a semi-complex Cisco switch to learn how Cisco works, and think it was a great choice. Performance is excellent and as advertised.

While the CISCO switch was functional for our needs the unit had significant hardware issues requiring replacement after 3 months. Only when I attempted to obtain service from CISCO did I find out that my purchase is not eligible because the seller is not an authorized reseller for CISCO.

This is a great little switch with lots of features. I use it in a home lab running 6 servers and several workstations through this baby. It just works which what you want. It was easy to configure but I am a network engineer so I may be biased as to its ease of use.

I went from "this switch can't do anything I want it to do" (Netgear, HP, etc -- was hard to find managed L3 switches with all 1Gb ports, etc)to "I'm not sure I'll ever be able to properly utilize this switch to its fullest".