Gigabit Ethernet, NEED Recommendations

[Intraveinous]

I need a 16Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch and 4 Gigabit Ethernet Cards. Don't need anything super fancy, single port will probably do it for the cards... Anyone have recommendations or vendor links???
Thanks a ton in advance!
Peace
John

[engjohn]

Go with 3Com, you cannot beat the quality and the support...

[Intraveinous]

OK... Yeah, if money was unlimited I would definately go with 3Com, and I still may, but 10Grand for a 24port switch is a lil more than I wanted to spend... I'm trying to do this on as minimal a budget as possible... Basically, I'm going to need at minimum, 6 Gigabit Copper ports and some kind of uplink (Gigabit or 100Base) to go to the switch for the rest of the network. So 6 Gigabit ports and a 100Base Uplink are minimums. I'll also need 4 Gigabit Copper NICs, 32bit 33MHz PCI. Basically, the configuration is 2 PowerMac G4s with built in Gigabit, 4 Image/Video Servers with the 4 Gigabit Cards, a switch to connect the Gigabit cloud together with an uplink port to connect it to the rest of the world. All on Copper Cat5e or Cat7. 3Com has a 6 port gigabit switch for 1200, which is a lil more on target in the price category, but it's missing the uplink to connect to the rest of the world. I'd feel safest with 3Com obviously, but anyone else reputable that can save a bit o money would be first choice.
Thanks
John

[engjohn]

Hardware desc.
http://www.trendware.com/products/TEG-S80TX.htm

Price on Pricewatch
http://queen.pricewatch.com/search/search.idq?ne=33432&l=33386&CiCodePage=Windows-1252&cr=TEG-S80TX&qc=%22TEG%22*+AND+%22S80TX%22*

Take a look at this...

[Intraveinous]

You are a god among men... :D
Thanks a lot! That's FAR easier to handle...
Peace
John

EDIT: DAMMIT!!! USSA.COM no longer exists, or at least, I can't get there from work... :( Hmmm... well, I know the kind of pricerange the TrendNet stuff falls into now, guess I'll look elsewhere, thanks again engjohn!

[rugby]

Why on earth do you need a 100mb uplink? I help design networks so tell me what you're trying to do and I'll give you my thoughts. Also, GigE is 10/100/1000 usually or 100/1000 compatible so it will negotiate to 100mb if you need to do so.

[Intraveinous]

Basic layout is like this... 4 PIII Servers with 400GB of HDD in each. They store digital images and video. 2-4 Macintosh G4 Grafix workstations (Built in 10/100/1000, so the company want's to take advantage of that), and a 18-24 other Macs, PCs with 100base cards on the 100base network. The other 18-24 computers will be accessing the image servers as well, and I figgered if I could get something with a 100base uplink port, though I could probably get a 100 base switch with a gigabit uplink port...
Regardless... does that make any more sense?
Peace
John

[rugby]

Okay, one more question, do the servers have gigE?

I would put the Gig stuff on it's own switch and then just have a 10/100 switch for the rest of the comps. Use one port on each one and make it an uplink between them. Oh yeah, you need to make the uplink a crossover cable. You've got a pretty simple setup. Piece of cake.

Also, if you need recommendations let me know, I've done a bit of researching for my job here.

[Intraveinous]

Yeah, servers will have 10/100/1000 cards in them. The plan was to put the Gig stuff on it's own switch and hopefully, though I got backwards at first, be able to send a gigabit stream to the 100base switch to give the larger amount of computer a bit more bandwidth. The 100base computer will be on their own switch (currently 100mbit only) but I figured performance may be increased a bit if I could get a gigabit pipe to that switch to be distributed between the others... I got a bit turned around in my an earlier post by saying that I needed a 100Mbit uplink on the gigabit switch when in actuallity what I wanted was a gigabit uplink on the 100Mbit switch... The topology is all pretty easy, just got messed up cuz I didn't get enough sleep, heh. Basically, all I was really looking for was a decent quality, lower price gigabit switch with at least 7 ports on it, and I've found that now...
Thanks to everyone for all the help on finding a good cheap solution, I was able to get 4 of the 10/100/1000 NICs and an 8 port switch for the same price as I was going to pay for the 6 port switch from 3Com...
Peace
John