Small Business Access Switch

Happy holidays,

I currently have an office of about 20 people on sight (less now due to COVID) and 10 people remote, with BOYD such as tablets and phones on the wireless networks at the office. Want to plan for 100% growth 3-5 years.

Have a fortigate for the NGFW and have an existing Unifi 48 port POE switch and some Unifi access points. Physical office size is small. I am in need of more switch access ports, and am trying to decide if I should keep going down the Unifi line, or get something like a FortiSwitch, or maybe something else. Will need a POE variant and a non-poe variant for switch location outside of the network closet.

I am looking to set up LAG interfaces if the Unifi makes more sense, or possibly replace the Unifi with a pair of FortiSwitch 248E POE with MCLAG and an aggregate interface to the "IDF" switch.

I am planning on getting a file server (probably TrueNas or Synology) which the primary use will be for VM backups on the upcoming Hyper-V server. All business critical documentation and files are cloud hosted. The VMs will not require much network bandwidth (1-5 Mb sustained), however i would prefer to have 10Gb SFP+ for future and the 248E's do not have them. However, Unifi does not have enterprise support and have been very happy with Fortinet support when i need them.

There is VoIP with a PBX with 12 extensions.

All email is cloud hosted with O365 and do not see us moving to on-prem at all.

Budget is about 1000-1500 per switch. 2 or 3 switches needed, depending on purchase path

-Cheers