Linking two sites

[Quillyn]

Two school sites on opposite sides of the road are wanting to link their networks (pipeline being installed). Server room to server room is about 800m. My school has a Cisco sg300 series with 2unused sfp ports, the other side known little about other than they are using netgear switches and their tech has told be he has at least one SPF port available.

 

What cable should we install? (I suspect cost saving will occur along the lines of just one internet connection across the road, 120 seats my end 200 his end)

 

To begin with the network will not be joined but I have server room space for his new server which next year will become our VMware host as well, what hardware would people recommend for the fibre?

 

Some draft company quoted £2.5k for the job, single line (with us laying the cable) what sort of ball park would people expect?

 

Thankyou

[LytchettNM]

If you are having a duct installed between the two site's why not purchase a pre terminated fibre and pull it in yourself? Much cheaper we have run several on our campus.

[fiendishlyclever]

If it's an infants school are any of them small enough to fit in the ducting? Call it a vocational education....

[3s-gtech]

Hmmm. You're outside the spec multi-mode optical fibre (OM4) to work at 1Gb/s. You may need to look at single mode fibre, though the costs can ramp a fair bit as the equipment at each end is more specialised. 100Mb/s will be fine over OM4 though, that's all we have between two sites and it works fine with many shared services (with certain services hosted on both sites to reduce traffic).

[Quillyn]

The workmen installing the ducting will be putting through all our cable so pre terminated is a option but three 20mm ducts will not fit any of our kids in even if we train up some of the tykes in the Nursery.

 

I suspect 100MB connection will be less than ideal for hosting all the other schools servers (their server room is being remade into a classroom).

 

Single mode fibre, whats involved any recommendations?

[Oaktech]

You are going to need single mode fibre.

 

You might be lucky with your cisco gear, you might find their is an SFP available to you that will run the single mode fibre - have a google. I wouldn't like to lay money on their being one for the netgear. I've used the Black Box media converters to convert a single mode fibre to multimode close to the end point, but it does add a small amount of latency (the ping went up from <1ms to 2-3ms)