
I bought a 4-port hub last week. It's probably that which has skewed the figures..
The server market may have stalled a bit as Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Fujitsu work through various stages of processor transitions, but the Ethernet switch market is going gangbusters. According to the box counters at IDC, the worldwide market for Layer 2 and 3 switching gear that adheres to the Ethernet protocol accounted …
I wouldn't use Catalyst 3500XL's in my home let alone an office. The world has moved on a lot since these switches were released ~15 years ago. A cheap gigabit switch will provide better functionality and use less power. The 3550's are still a pretty good switch if you have layer-3 requirements.
If only I could convince one of our customers who has a large London office with around 20 of them still in use that it was worthwhile replacing the equipment rather than paying for engineering time to try and paper over the cracks....
If you have never played with 40 Gb Ethernet and Solid State Drives, you have no clue what you are missing. Everything happens blazingly fast. File tansfer dialog boxes don't even start up for 250 MB files because the transfer happens so fast. A 1 GB file is fully on your machine from a file share in less than 3 seconds in a standard configuration. It takes that long because the SSD on the server can't give it up any faster. Once Server 2012 hits the mainstream everyone will be able to create file servers that dish up data at blazing speeds without a SAN and even without a switch for a small number of users.