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Posted by Mike on September 28, 2006, 8:04 am
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> Mike wrote:
>
>> I have a few wiring bids for an older/old building we occupy. I want to
>> rewire the data portion of the building, but the cost is prohibitive
>> (final decision tomorrow). Currently we have a single gig switch that
>> supports many mini-switches, one mini-switch in each office. We're a small
>> software development shop and have only 15 people, but we have twice that
>> number of computers for development, application building, support, and
>> training. The machines are currently 100Mb/s. The application building
>> machines might benefit from gig access to the servers where test case
>> data is stored.
>
> You don't say why you want to rewire. If the servers are near the
> gigabit switch, replacing the server NICs with gigabit NICs would be
> a good start.
>
>
> Next easiest is to replace the mini-switches, which I assume are
> 100Mb/s, with gigabit mini-switches. The real answer depends a lot on
> the traffic patterns, but with gigabit switches you should have enough
> for full speed 100Mb/s connections between a few machines at once, or
> from some machines to the servers. It is normally very unlikely for
> all machines to require full 100Mb/s at the same time, and the servers
> probably wouldn't handle it well, anyway. (Especially not running
> windows.)
>
> That should be fairly affordable, though it might be that your
> current net is fast enough.
>
> -- glen
>
>
The current setup is a central 24 port gig switch (hp 2626)
that has each of the ports going to mini-switches in each of
the offices. We're a small development shop. Each office has
a windows workstation for the developer and at least one other
computer used as a build or support machine. In the training room
I have nine windows machines that are connected to mini-switches
before reaching the main (core) switch.
Instead of a hub-and-spoke I have something more like a fractal
snowflake. I wanted to rewire the building (our floor) to
run enough drops to each office so that I could eliminate the
mini-switches and run every machine directly from the central
switch(es). Because of the age of the building with exterior
walls of brick and interior walls that are near impossible to fish
cables inside, I'm switching to plan B where I keep the existing
wiring and replace the mini-switches with something that is more
commercial than a linksys 'workgroup' switch.
Looking at newegg I find the SMC and Netgear devices that
look interesting. I prefer not to have wall-warts and for the
switches to have internal power supplies, but that want may not
be practical for switches that are 5 to 8 ports (and in one case
it may be a 12 port switch in the training room).
One option is to use wireless, but I don't like that option. When
the nightly build happens all source code is mirrored to each
build machine, the application built, then there are many test
cases with a large amount of data for each test case that must be
available for each build machine's test after the build. I do not
want to send that much data across a wireless link and I do not
want to use a wireless link anyway. I prefer actual wiring and
many of the machines are unix boxes that I could not get direct
installed wireless cards for anyway.
Mike
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