Don't go cheap on the high port count portions. Netgear looks great but tends to buckle under load. Cisco is solid but $$$$$$$$$! ouch! There are several middle tier brands that are fine. The things to looks for are command line management and not just a web gui. With cli tools you can poll from the ltsp servers for switch port locations of a mac and use that to set up many rules like default printers and availability of applications (some teachers are OK with puzzle games, others are not). At 30TB/mo, you only need a big gig switch to split out to the classrooms then 100M/1G-uplink in the classrooms. Most schools seem to have only 1 cat5e line per room. With only 60 clients a single decent server with 16G RAM will drive the entire school. Think 8 cores in the server. I did this in 2007 with 4 cores per server and 8GB ram and could run 100 clients per server with the caveat that extensive flash use would bog things down badly. <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Joseph Bishay <<a href="mailto:joseph.bishay@gmail.com">joseph.bishay@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"> Good day, I hope everyone is well. I am in the process of moving our school to a new facility, and I need to order our network switches. Everything will be running at gigabit speed so I'm looking for some good recommendations on hardware. Based on ntop, we move about 20 TB of data per month but I expect that to grow to 30 TB in the new facility. We will have about 60 thin clients in that new building so I will need several switches. What do you think? Thank you Joseph _______________________________________________ K12OSN mailing list <a href="mailto:K12OSN@redhat.com">K12OSN@redhat.com</a> <a href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn" target="_blank">https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn</a> For more info see <<a href="http://www.k12os.org" target="_blank">http://www.k12os.org</a>> </blockquote></div> -- -- James P. Kinney III As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome. - 2011 Noam Chomsky <a href="http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/</a>