Suggestions for designing new network 1

[tektipsblitz]

I have two buildings connected with five single mode fiber cables.

At the moment I have unmanaged gigabit switches in each building. They are each connected to gigabit to fiber media convertors, which use 1 of the single mode fiber connections.

My goals are:
- improve the speed of the fiber link (up from 1gbe if possible)
- use more than one fiber connection for failover/speed
- in one building I need about 120 network ports (at the moment I have unmanaged gigabit switches chained together) - i want to simplify this.
- in another building I have four 24port 100BASE-FX switches, with 1Gbe uplink ports into the unmanaged switch.

All ideas welcome!

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

I would look into:
1x procurve 5406 with 4x 24-port copper Gb modules & 2x 20-port copper + 2-port 10Gb SFP+, plus 4x SFP+ transceivers and 1 extra power supply for each chassis for redundancy.
Gives you 136 1Gb copper ports plus 4 10Gb fibre ports per chassis, plus redundant power and link aggregation across diverse modules for link redundancy. These can be used as Layer3 switches without additional licencing.
Very good value.

Compare with 2 stacks of 3x Cisco 3750-X switches, which cost a bomb, and the 10Gb transceivers also cost a bomb. Very expensive option, which is why people who use Cisco don't use much 10Gb yet.

Compare with 2 stacks of 3 HP H3C switches (S5800), which have 48 ports copper and 4 ports 10Gb SFP+ each, giving 144 ports copper and 12 ports 10Gb per stack.
Also very good value.