I am trying to educate myself on gigabit switching technology...

Anyone have any good links that explain this?

Does cat5 cable work with this? Or must I use optical?

What do you want to know? Gigabit can be run over either optical or cat 5. I have both kinds of switches in my lab. Switches are switches and more or less Fast ethernet switches work the same as gigabit. They just won't do as much as fast as the gigabit switches. As far as technology goes, read up on link aggregation (both static and LACP), VLANs, VLAN trunking and Spanning tree protocol. Those are the most common issues I deal with.

Thanks!

I have found some switches that have both regular ethernet ports and GBIC ports. Can you use the GBIC port to "stack" two gigabit switches?

This is the switch I am looking at:

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=83

It only has 20 ports and I forsee a need for more than this in the near future...

The GBIC's are optical transceivers that get plugged in and allow you run optical connections, usually over wider distances than you can brigde with Cat5 (such as between buildings). They ain't cheap, a standard GBIC goes for > $400, if you n eed to go for more than a 100 meters or so it's easy $1000 (that's why there's usually just an empty slot, most people don't need optical and then you need a GBIC for your specific application).

You can also stack switches (just like with ethernet switches) through cat5. But Cat 5 or optical, you waste 2 ports and add latency, so if you know that you'll need more, it's usually more economical to buy a bigger switch up front.

Have a look at the DELL PowerConnect series -- I bought a 24 port one recently for $2000, 4 Cat5 ports can be moved to optical by adding up to 4 GBICs. Nice box.

mlp

sweet... thanks!

where i work we use CISCO 3550's, 10/100 managed with fiber uplinks
and GBIC stacking. pretty nice stuff but very costly. they also allow you
to do some bandwidth limiting at the port which was needed because uploads
used to kill our network.

here is a link if you want another example of a powerful switch.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/si/casi/ca3550/