Which Switch?

[Precision24]

I have a Civil Engineering firm with 2 locations 250 miles apart. We recently upgraded their bandwidth to 600mbps at one location and 400mbps at the second location.

Currently they are using MX64 devices that only offer 250mbps throughput. They have agreed that they should upgrade to MX75's offering up to 1Gbps throughput. Great!

One location already has an MS-120. What should I install in the other? Same model or go with a higher spec? 

They need the ability to transfer large cad and image files back and forth quickly. They can do it now but it is a bit slow.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

Tim

[Brash]

For Meraki switches, the different models generally coincide with features and port speed. 
So which model you opt for generally depends on your architecture and need for various features.

MS12x are perfectly suitable for L2 switching with no frills.

MS2xx introduce physical stacking and routing
MS3xx and MS4xx move into higher bandwidth and multigig territory

https://meraki.cisco.com/product-collateral/ms-family-datasheet/?file

Within the models, you also need to look at the different amounts of power available for PoE+ output to connected AP's.

Generally speaking, your bottlenecks will always be the WAN connection from the MX rather than bandwidth across the switch, so a switch upgrade may not do anything to improve file transfers if they're going cross-site.

[DarrenOC]

Hi @Precision24 , that would depend on a number of things per site?  Do you need physical stacking? With you using the MS120’s then you’re limited to 1Gbps uplinks between comms rooms. How much PoE do you require per switchport (if any)?

[PhilipDAth]

As the others have said, need more info.  Especially the number of users.

I quite like the MS350-24X.  I think they are a good price point to get a small number of 10Gbe ports.

https://meraki.cisco.com/product/switches/stackable-access-switches/ms350-24x/ 

It has 4 x SFP+ (10Gbe modular ports), and 8 x MGig ports.  The MGig ports support 2.5Gb/s, 5Gb/s and 10G/s.

So if the machines doing CAD had a 2.5Gb/s NIC (cheap) or 10GbaseT NIC added, they could have a high-speed connection between each other (in the same site).  I assume there is some kind of server or NAS.  Ideally, that would connect that via the SFP+ ports.

You can also stack the MS350-24Xs to increase port density.