Network upgrade

[JordanT91]

Hi all. I'm looking for a bit of advice on the network I inherited a less than a year ago. I've finally gotten round to tidying the cabinets up and working out how it's all connected. See the attachment.

There's four cabinets in school (actually five but I'm counting the two mini cabs in the stock room as one). The ICT Room is where the main cabinet is - this is where the core switches, router and firewall are. The roof is falling in here and the the ICT room is being converted into a staff room so ideally I'd like to start making the server room the main cabinet.

 

The router, 2960 switch and firewall are all owned by our LA and all limited to 100Mb ethernet. We have a sub-10Mb internet connection but this is hopefully being upgraded to 100Mb very soon. The firewall is used for the admin network within the school.

 

All of our switches are gigabit between each other and to each network port as well. All cabling in the school is Cat5e except the links between some of the HP 2530s which are fibre. It is still only gigabit though. Our wireless APs are only 54mbps and they are connected directly to the Netgear switches which are PoE capable or when connected to the HP 2530 through PoE injectors which are limited to 100Mb. We are hopefully upgrading to a Ruckus wireless network shortly so the APs will need gigabit connections.

 

The servers are obviously in the server room (mostly just VMs now). They back up to a NAS in the external building. It takes most of the night for the back ups to complete but I'm not sure if this is limited by disk speed or the 1Gb links between the two cabinets.

 

So with nearly all of the school's network connected with Gigabit, would it be worth upgrading the switches to allow for a 10Gb backbone? We are getting more and more devices all the time, wired PCs and possibly a lot more iPads in the next year.

 

Thanks.

[aking99]

I'd do this in stages. Look at what you need to do right now. Room being converted means something needs to happen to work with that.

Backups taking all night could be disk speed (very likely) or could be that the backups are spaced apart to have less running at the same time.

Those are what you have and need to do now.

Then plan for near future, what are you likely to add or have confirmed purchases over the next 2 years and how will that affect the bandwidth? I can't tell from your post what time scales you are working on for the wireless update.

 

Get the wired kit where you want them before doing the wireless upgrade or the wireless upgrade will see little enhancement and appear wasted money.

I'd recommend HP switches too

[JordanT91]

The ICT room is being moved to a room where there are currently no network ports - the current staff room. I will buy a switch and put it in the server room cabinet. At the moment that part of the school is served by the ICT room cabinet but there isn't much extra capacity on the switches or in the cabinet itself and like I said in my post I want to make the server room cabinet the main one. If I was to start my upgrade with this new switch, I'd want 10Gb fibre. The Netgear ProSafe S3300-52X looks suitable and it's a lot cheaper than an equivalent HP.

 

The backups I'm not too concerned with to be honest, either way the NAS is only gigabit. I just thought it would be good to have a 10G link from the server room because the servers and current switch do get hammered during the day.

 

The wireless upgrade is not confirmed yet but it will probably happen in the Summer. It's not really dependant on upgrading my switches though, as long as PoE is taken care of and the APs don't use our current 100Mb injectors. It will definitely be better than our current WLAN!