Recommended hardware (switch)?

I'm running a small hosting business from my home and I've got about 5 machines I'm using. I'd like to add more machines, but I need a bigger switch because I don't have enough empty ports on the D-Link router I'm using now.

The way I'm setup currently is the machines are multi-homed... meaning they each have 2 NIC cards and each one responds to both an external IP and also a non-routable IP. This gives me "backdoor" access so I can access the machines via my LAN.

I was talking to somebody at a computer store here in my area and they suggested I get something called a "managed switch". I'm not familiar with this, so I want to make sure I understand.

Basically he explained to me that on a managed switch, you're able to assign some of the ports to be on 1 network and the rest of the ports to be on another network. From this, I concluded it might be something I should get.

If I got one of these, maybe I could get like a 24 port switch and divide the ports in half so that 12 of them are serving my external IPs and the other 12 are serving my LAN. So on each machine, I would plug in a line from eth0 to one of the first 12 ports, and from eth1 plug that into one of the other 12 ports.

Is that pretty much correct? If not, can someone explain what he means? Or explain what I probably need? If I'm pretty close on the concept, maybe someone can suggest a make and model??? I've never bought anything like this before.

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

 

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