>Network: i'm not a neteng, don't listen to me, but obviously it should be managed with nice fat switching fabric bandwidth, good forwarding rate and big uplink module support. 48-port switches don't always have the same bandwidth ratios as 24-port switches, and uplinks are much easier to manage on a 24-port than a 48.

With current gen ASICs and switches, this isn't generally true anymore. A $1000 48 port 1Gbps switch is fully non-blocking with almost 1:1 10G uplinks (48x1G in, 4x10G out)