We have essentially standardized our 10G Ethernet networking on 10G-T , which runs over relatively conventional copper network cables. The pragmatic advantage of 10G-T is that it provides for easy interoperability between 1G and 10G-T equipment. You can make all of your new in-wall cabling 10G-T rated and then plug 1G equipment and switches into it because those offices or rooms or whatever don't need 10G (yet), you can ship servers with 10G-T ports and not worry about people who are still at 1G, and so on. It's quite flexible and enables slow, piece by piece upgrades to 10G ( which can be an important thing ). However, we've run into a problem with our 10G-T environment, and that is finding good 10G-T switches that don't have a gigantic number of ports.

Our preference in Ethernet switches is ones that have around 24 ports. In our current network implementation , we try to make as many switches as possible be 'dumb' switches that carry only a single (internal) network , and we also put switches into each machine room rack . All of this means that 24 ports per switch is about right for most switches; we rarely want to connect up more than that many things on one network to a single switch in a single place. We can live with 16-port or 10-port switches, but that starts to get expensive because we have to buy (a lot) more switches.

Unfortunately, 24-port 10G-T switches appear to be an increasingly unpopular thing, as far as we can tell. At one point there were a reasonable number of inexpensive sources for good ones, but recently many of those seem to have gotten out of the business (and there's a few that have products that have thermals that don't work for us). You can probably get 24-port 10G-T switches from the 'enterprise' switch vendors but you'll pay 'enterprise' prices for them, there's a reasonable number of sources for 48-port 10G-T switches that are too big for us, and a certain amount of smaller 10G-T switches, but the middle seems to have gone mostly missing.

My suspicion is that this has to do with the shifts in the server market from plenty of relatively low (rack) density on-premise sales to an increasing amount of large cloud or high-density datacenter sales. A fully populated rack likely needs more than 24 ports of local connections, and you're buying the whole rack's worth at once, making incremental upgrades much less compelling. And 10G-T itself has drawbacks in high-density situations; the cables are physically bulkier than fiber, the ports (still) use more heat, SFP+ ports have a lot of flexibility, and increasingly people want datacenter networking that runs faster than 10G, even for individual machines.

At the same time, a 24-port 10G-T switch is awkwardly large for a lot of other situations. Most people don't have a use for that many 10G ports at home or in smaller offices, and on top of that 10G-T ports use enough power and are hot enough that the switch will need decent fans, which will make it noisy (and so not something you want to have out in the open). At most you might put such a 24-port switch in a local wiring closet, assuming that the wiring closet has enough air flow that a relatively hot switch doesn't cook itself.

(It's possible that there are good 24 port 10G-T switches out there that we haven't found. We know of TP-Link's offerings, but for local reasons we prefer to avoid them. Similarly, I believe that 16 or 24 port SFP+ switches with 10G-T SFP+ modules are likely to be decidedly too expensive for us, once we buy all the SFP+ modules needed.)