Why would you want to purchase inferior quality products for an automation project? When you are using the IP protocol for industrial applications, the price should not be a factor. Performance is king (just like me), and the more expensive the better. My customers are so happy with my ethernet networks that I charge more than $25 an hour.
I recommend Hirschman switches for everything. In single control panels the normal switches are fine, but for a large system you must have managed switches with IGMP snooping and always use a fibre optic switch which enables you to use stack address scheduling.