Someone uses this switches in a datacenter?

Question

I have some interest in the SG-300 or SG-500 small business switches for small to moderate usage.
This are rack switches but my question is if someone is actually using them in a datacenter rack with public servers instead of the catalysts?
I understand they are small business units but would they stand the heat, vibration in a rack? How good are they on practice?
I have an older catalyst, it costs less new now than some of this small business ones, but I really need gigabit ports for internal LAN traffic and my DC tells me none has this small business units in their DC, its not normal to use them as they are not high performance switches. Im worried with going with a small business device which are actually Linksys, and not Cisco. I have some Linksys devices for personal and home usage and they are still going for years. But I don´t know how they perform outside this enviroments. I need to stay under 1000$ per switch.
Would they fail in a couple of months? Can they be clustered (2 switches) so if one fails the other one takes the network until I replace the failed one? If yes, I could take the risk but a single dying switch would be a disaster.
My needs are low, gigabit speeds between servers for backup, and some storage, but usually less then 50 mbit on the public WAN. Are these switches really only for small office use or would they work fine with servers in a facility? If yes, I would love to hear some real experiences, everyone I ask, most of them say not go with this switches but then why are they even rackable? They can´t be this bad or they are really not designed for 24/7 usage?
I would appreciate some experiences with how much traffic are you passing on them and for how long (months) because I don´t know anyone using them so far in a remote facility.

Answer 1

But that is not a fair comparision. Im one person and have currently catalysts in production. It would rather depend on traffic size and time of use.
I would assume its not the same to have peaks of 500 mbits for one hour a day in some office with a constant of 10 mbits going in and out in trough in office hours (usually 8hs) vs a rack with 10 servers where its pushing 100 mbits 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and with 1 gigabit peaks, several a day.
This is not my case, its just one example, but that is why I posted this here since public internet servers in a high density datacenters require usually the catalyst series, that is what you usually see. I have one setup where I only push 20 mbits on average with 100 mbit peaks, short burst per day, but those 20 mbits need to be 24 hours a day just dropping a bit at night. So its not just about quantity but for how long. It runs an older 2950 which I want to replace with a SG500, mainly for its 52 gigabit ports which I need for server to server connectivity.
Reason I asked is someone is actually pushing constantly data via these switches vs just office deployments. The 500 series seems to be stackable and have resilent setups, so they are quite interesting for starting out with moderate to medium usage. My fear factor is not if they will be able to push what they advertise on each port, but for how long until they fail or start to act strange like dropping packets or requiring reboots. 1 year? 6 months, 2 years?
Does someone even know what the MTBF is for this small business units? They are Cisco so I do expect the best out of them. I would assume they are just as good as the high end ones, but with some less features, in particular for advanced network setups.