Hello all,

I'm a low-level UNIX sysadmin recently tasked with deciding on a router / switch solution for a wind turbine manufacturing company. I've got a lot of experience with UNIX servers, but absolutely none when it comes to managed switches / routers, and I feel like I might be in a bit over my head. If anyone has a recommendation for what to buy, that would be great.

We currently have about 35 employees, and are growing rapidly -- we're anticipating hiring 15 more people this year. We're also moving to a new building, which is why we're re-thinking our IT setup.

We currently use about 5 hubs that are daisy-chained together, connected to a wireless router, which is connected to the internet. This isn't an optimal setup at all, and when we move to our new building next month, we'd like to have all employees connecting through our existing wireless access point or through a managed switch. Our internet connection will still be business class cable (6Mb/s down, 1Mb/s down.)

What we need:

a 48 port managed switch

What we don't need:

firewall, vlan capability, vpn (we use OpenVPN and everyone likes it)

We don't host our website and our server is for private vpn use only.

Questions:

Can we get an inexpensive (< $1000) managed switch that can be connected to a router / cable modem with minimal configuration?

Could such a switch handle DHCP or could it be handled by a router (and would that work if DHCP information was passed to clients through the switch)?

Is it possible to set up a solution that requires little to no client-side configuration?

Thanks for your help, sorry if these questions betray me as a novice -- I am.

Best,

-GS