We have two 48 port Dell PowerConnect Switches.
The 2848 is our main switch with all our servers and uplink to the router/firewall.
The 2748 is our second switch for the rest of the computers and network devices that did not fit on the 2848.
When we moved our office four years ago, we had two 2748 switches but one did not power back up. Dell replaced this with the 2848 under warranty.
Both switches are set up in managed mode and always have had issues keeping accurate time and when running continuous pings to the IP of web interface, response times can be as high as 4 ms with an average of 1ms for direct connection or 2ms if pinging through one switch to the other. We have a VOIP PBX and all calls are clean and working well. We have shrunk over the last two years from 60 employees to 20. What has seemed odd is that even though we are at 1/3 the number of users, our connections to our servers seem to be more sluggish then they used to be. I have checked the switches ports RMON and do not see errors or collisions per ports. Most users have trouble with our database program pausing (Apps Server) or Email (internal Exchange server) or files on our file server taking a while to open. All servers have had the temp files cleared and hard drives defraged. All servers are Win2003 except our one year old 2008 server which now holds our roaming profiles. Windows and antivirus are up to date.
I am planning on bringing down all devices this weekend and then bringing them back one a time. As I bring the servers up, I will recheck updates, run maintenance on exchange and/or other databases, defrag and finally run check disk. There are no errors in the logs and all four drives in the RAID five array report ok. I have used the performance monitor in the SW dashboard and every so often i see a hard drive spike of 10 or 20 but that does not correspond when users have slow downs. i have seen outlook on my machine say that it is waiting to connect to the exchange server and the performance monitor does not show a hard drive spike in the hard drive queue length.
My thought is that my switches are getting tired and running poorly but I can not find a test to prove that they drop packets. With less users you would think a speed increase but that is not what we are seeing. Computers a re a mostly XP as I am the only one on Win7.
Am I thinking correctly that this is bad switches?