In December we had one of our NETGEAR 48 port switches die.  Well, we planned on replacing all of our switches this year to a more enterprise ready switches.  We ordered three new switches this month to go with the one that was purchased in December.  Before we ever got around two installing them we last two of the old switches.  It has been kind of odd that we have now had three switches die in such a short period of time.

A big part of this upgrade project has been pulling cable.  When we are done the entire network will have been rewired and the wiring cabinet will have been moved to the server room.  This could be part of the problem with the failing switches.  Right now the wiring cabinet is located in a wood cabinet above the break room.  It is very dusty and gets extremely hot during the summer.  By the end of this week all off the office computers will be wired into the new cabinet and be gigabit enabled. (Yeah!)   There has been a big difference for all the users of our ERP and CRM applications.  The ERP is a VERY thick client.  Once it is running there is not much of a difference, but now it start much quicker.  The CRM runs better, unfortunately the reason it was running so slow was because over time the scope of it has changed and some of the additions that I have added have been two chatty with the SQL Server.

Maybe once this is done I will post some before and after pictures.