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santaowns wrote: » where is the cabling going between the floors? is it by electrical lines? if so you will need shielded cat6 or fiber. Since you have such a small business yes 1 switch will work, ideally you would put 2 switches in for redundancy, if one died you just move them over to the other switch while its being replaced.
Iristheangel wrote: » I wouldnt necessarily put redundancy at the access layer but it all depends. Whats your budget? How much availability does this company require if a switch was to fail? Do they expect or is there a possibility of them expanding floors or getting more people? Depending on the answers to those questions, you may have to tweak your design a bit. There are also quite a few design guides on Ciscos site for small and medium branch design.
it_consultant wrote: » I regularly run cable from multiple floors to a single MDF. From a physical perspective the only time I break things into IDFs is if the runs are too long or we run out of room in the MDFs. I can see no advantage to segregating the floor with a separate switch when VLAN'ing is (and has been) acceptable practice for a long time. Sometimes this is impossible, say the bundle of fiber has to go up an elevator shaft or something and it can't have a thick bundle of CAT6 added to it, then 2 pair of fiber looks a lot better and you would need a separate switch. In your case, I think this isn't a concern.
earweed wrote: » Each floor having its' own switch is a good idea if expansion is likely to happen in the future. If possible have all the "outlets" look professional and have 2 wires to each pc access point for redundancy. I did a single building office like this a while back (about same number of offices but one 2 floor building) and ran all cabling through suspended ceilings and down (inside) walls. It was a pain doing it this way but looks better than running cables down the wall in a plastic/rubber channel.
it_consultant wrote: » It is fairly simple to leave some copper lines open in the trunk line back to the MDF - in which case the new copper would only have to be run to the panel that all the other cable is run into. This problem has been solved many times over. I have seen access layer switching where the cable combines 100 1 gig ports into not only one cable/conduit (that is easy) but 100 ports into one physical port. This requires special switches and cables but it demonstrates that cable density is an easy problem to overcome. I am doing a similar roll-out where I have one MDF room and 2 idf rooms across a large open space - large enough to be outside the copper ethernet distance limit. If that was not a factor, I would wire everything to one room.
BloodSweatPings wrote: » The first point, providing that i run cables from one switch, do mean just leave cables in the ceiling ready for the expansion and when the time comes just go ahead and start patching them up to the MDF. Then run the cables to the new location easily and just socket up (rj45) OR were you reffering to an IDF based network. sorry bit confusing In the office general traffic tends to be email one site to site VPN and internet browsing. I doubt i need to segregate it and LACP it. When our new building which is directly attached to the current one comes into operation, i may install link aggregation on a switch and segregate it with a new switch.
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