Network Cabling Advice 2

[NeilCNF]

Good evening,

quite likely a very simple question for most of you here, but I have just taken ownership of an industrial unit and I am planning to date wire the whole place with Cat6a cabling. The unit is quite big and I suspect will have around 100 or more data points within it. Ranging from offices to the warehouses. I would expect the longest run to any point will be about 75 metres.

My question is, what is best practice?....... would you normally use multiple switches in the different areas of the building with them all running back to a single switch in the comms room, or would it be better to pull all the cables back from every data socket to the comms room and connect in there using multiple patch panels and switches. As I have a blank canvas with this building either method is easily achieved, but I am curious to know what best practice is.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Neil

 

[CMUK]

If you can get somewhere central in the building that will act as your comms room and run all your outlets from there, if your max run is 75m it's hard to justify a second comms room, it's much easier to manage if all in the one place

Calum M
ACSS

 

[meyer1y2k]

For the long haul, if you can have a single cable with 2 end points (switch port and device), it will be much easier to troubleshoot. One customer I work with loves to just install 5 port switches everywhere rather than run cable. While it is a cheap solution in the beginning, it is a nightmare to troubleshoot when something goes wrong because this person has not documented where everything is. He now has this nightmare of a LAN to manage. I have seen one of the 5 port switches fail and bring down the entire LAN. It took him hours to figure out because he "forgot about that switch".

In your case, you would just need to troubleshoot the switch port, the port on the patch panel, the cable, the jack, or the endpoint which is much easier.

Labor wise it is generally just as easy to pull multiple cables as 1 and, compared to other device, cabling and hardware is fairly inexpensive.

Spend the time to run the cable. It will easily pay for itself down the road in reliability and management.