Power over Ethernet (PoE) basics and beyond

In my head enterprise grade switch has 48 ports with some >10g SFPs for uplink. What does enterprise grade mean to you? And what enterprise grade switches are poe powered?

Arista 710P for instance. I don’t see what port count has to do with it, it runs the same OS and has the same capabilities as all their other switches. Cisco has a Catalyst 9k like this too.

It's such a wide field that it's hard to pin down. I agree if your thinking about what a business that isn't just a handful of people needs then we'd be looking at the kind of switch you're thinking of if it has standard office workers. But soon as you start talking about businesses that are manipulating central data (which keep in mind would probably include most primary business, design workers or anyone working with media not just software people) you're talking about a wide gamut of devices that you wouldn't really (at least traditionally) call consumer grade.

Mikrotik website has a good selection of them and if you look at the other hardware types it'll be interesting in getting an idea of weird things you don't see in normal offices.

https://mikrotik.com/products/group/switches

Apart from obviously larger bandwidth options like 28qfsp 100gb (I'm unaware if mikrotik does them but 400gb is normal in some circles) there's things like reverse POE switches, media converter switches, and all sfp+ switches.

Poe++ exists and you can use switches with it to power poe+ switches that will power poe switches. Or they can be used to power laptops or NUCS directly.

In my head, one of the things that makes up an "enterprise grade" switch is 48 ports. Because "for the enterprise", in my opinion, evokes some idea of large scale deployment, not a mom and pop trinket store with one PoS cash register device and three company computers.

What does enterprise grade mean to you?

The smaller switches like the Arista 710P are meant for deployment out at the edge of the network where you want something small and quiet (e.g. at people’s desks or in conference rooms) to provide more ports without needing as many runs back to the network core where the big loud switches live. They’re still enterpise grade since they support enterprise features like centralized management, VLANs, QoS, IGMP snooping, etc.

So my arista 710p-16p isn’t entries because it’s not 48 ports? Or my Nexus 9300 24p? I’ve got some old juniper 4300 32F ports handling 1g fibres (moderns arista switches aren’t great as the 25g SFPs won’t autoneg at 1g on fibre as they don’t support clause 37)

My standard campus switches are 722s with 48 ports and 25/10 SFPs, but there are use cases when smaller switches make sense.

>> I like pancakes.

> Oh, so you hate waffles?

Hell, the switches we’re talking about support OSPF, BGP, VXLAN, the works. THAT is enterprise to me.