We are moving offices and during a transition period we would like to link the buildings (probably using dark fibre) and run file/print/email services over the WAN until all the people and kit are moved.

Our LAN is a gigabit ethernet backbone with 100meg full duplex to every desk.

My question is how big a pipe do we need between the buildings to maintain acceptable performance - 400 users IP only.

I know there's lots of variables - just need a rough idea!

depends on your data transfer throughout all users. I would imagine 1mbit up and down would suffice for everyday use. Its fairly cheap to get for a month or so.

In addition, you say your moving this data over IP only. I would deffinetly reccomend against this.

For the extra little bit of work it would involve, just set up IPSec or even a VPN.

Good luck with the move.

Aren't dark fibre links usually point to point private? In which case why encrypt data?

yep

hmm, for some reason I bypassed the text in brackets when I read the post :?

:cool: thanks.

Wr have a 2Mb connection back to one of our clients. We have around 75 people here that use the connection for file/print on Novell servers.

It's a bit slow, but acceptable. I certainly wouldn't want to go much lower, but the majority of work is Telnet traffic to Unix boxes. It's great for that, but you do notice a drop when folk start ftp'ing to/from the servers.

We have another 30 users on seperate client network here too. They mainly use it for Mainframe connectivity and e-mail (Exchange/Outlook). That's on a 128k leased line connection and works well for the Mainframe sessions and even e-mail. File/print is all local, so that's why they get away with that size of pipe.

It really depends on how much continous traffic you can expect across the pipe. A suitably large print job would see the available bandwidth dip suddenly and 400 users trying to authenticate or download roaming profiles might cripple it.

Stefan

You see its people giving lusers 100 meg to the desktop which encourages microshaft to continue trying to fill the bandwidth. You dont *need* 100 meg to save a few word files, send some crap jokes and surf scoobynet :rolleyes:

If you monitored a few key switch points for a few dyas you'd know exactly how much bandwidth you *used* - which would be a good start for evaluating what you *need* :)

I remember when we were lucky to get 10mb/s half-duplex - and we were grateful.......;)

Deano

Am I missing something - if you're talking dark fibre between the buildings why not just extend the Gigabit LAN backbone? :) 200 people trying to access file/print over a 2Mbps will be painful for them, and you!

Richard