jase555

at moment, remote office has basically 10 base t hubs chained together about 9 in total,

want to spec an upgrade to network,

do i say 1 unmanaged switch and 8 10/100 hubs or something else

whats the difference between a manged / unmanged switch

thanks in advance

jase

ozzy

erm, one's manageable, the other isn't that's on the face of it. You really need to look at the backbone speed/bandwidth and work out if you want/need full bandwidth from every port i.e. do you want the switch/hub to handle all ports transmitting at a full 100Mbps. A 24-port one would need something greater than a 2.5Gbps internal backbone.

For the cost these days, get a few managed switches. IMHO, I'd stay well away from hubs as they are very inefficient for a large number of users.

We have 4 x Dell 48-port 10/100 (+2 gigabit) managed switches here and I've had no problems so far. They were far cheaper than Cisco alternatives and are more than capable of handling our LAN bandwidth.

Stefan

jase555

thx so far m8

jase

jase555

Hi Guys

Being a Network Idiot ,

Its setup like this

9 hubs over 2 floors linked via the last port on each hub, lika a "daisy chain" I Think,all 10 base T most of the hold various machines

total machines i reckon is 35

looking to upgrade

budget within reason I think

whats the besy way to improve as network traffic will increase

going to go with a dell server running 2003

so is chaing the hubs together like this the right way ?

is one switch enough or should I get a couple,

be easy on this with me guys as for networks I am a "network dummy"

thanks

jase

ozzy

Your problem sounds like a logistical one getting connections to both floors. How is the existing wiring run now? Do you have one large wiring closet with all floor points running to a patch panel or do you have seperate wiring closets amd patch panels on each floor?

If you have the later, you could have two seperate switch (one on each floor) and link them via a Gigabit backbone. You could also run two seperate Gigabit cables from the switch to the server and use load-balancing or redundancy on the Dell server as it should come with a dual-port Gigabit card.

The number of switches is usually dicated by the bandwidth you need. So, a large 48-port switch should have a decent internal bandwidth to support all ports running at full speed.

A cheaper switch may not have sufficient bandwidth or processing power to handle all the ports running at the same time.

You could split the switches into smaller units (2 x 24-port, for example) but the connection between the two switches may then be the weaklink i.e. each 24-port switch may have a 2 or 4Gb internal backbone, but you then connect both of them together via a single gigagbit external backbone (i.e. you're now down to 1Gb).

Other way of looking at it is two switches give you a little redundancy. So, if one fails, then only half your network is affected.

Stefan

jase555

Hi Stefan

from what I have been told

there is an cat 5 type patch panel in one room (upstairs) and cat 5 points on the walls , downstairs, there is a whole in the floor where the patch panel is with some lengths of cat 5 going somewhere,

its an office we have inherited and I have been told to improve the network

so at the moment I reckon maybe a couple of the hubs are into the patch panel and the rest are daisy chained together.

I will be putting a small w2k3 server in,

what will be the best way of setting the hardware up

1 24 port unmanged switch in the patch panel room with as much going into it as possible, then say on the other floor put in another 24 port unmanged switch,

leave the other hubs as is , and say bank on a shed load of 100 base T cards instead of the 10 base T for connection.

Is it worthwhile replacing the old 10 base T hubs with new 100 base T hubs

thanks again

jase

Puff The Magic Wagon!

iTrader: (2)

Without seeing the layout etc, the fact that you have 9 hubs for 35 machines is a bit of overkill.

Cat5e (or 6) the whole lot, if not already done, back to a central point/patch panel & then get the 48pt managed switch as described. This gives you flexibility for the future.

Dunno what your useage is etc but maybe get gig to the server you plan to put in if your throughput requires it.

Explain what it is that your company does and what (other than making it "faster" ) you're trying to achieve. It may be that you don't require gig throughput now or in the foreseeable future.

jase555

it will be file server and email

the plan is - as its a remote office who really only do R & D from an engineering point of view.

want to stick critical files on server and map email data locations to it apart from that the other stuff they run is on another source.

my other worry about network is as its inherited i do not know much about it apart from i have been thrown around 4k to get it fixed

thanks

jase

also thing is that site location is about size of a football park maybe bigger , they R & D huge baseframe type things