Secondary School Infrastructure Upgrade - Doable under £10k?

[CyBeRkId2002]

Hi all,

 

I am currently trying to work out whether a whole site infrastructure upgrade is doable under the £10k mark - aiming for 10gb backbone? I have audited our network and our requirements at present are below, along with the kit I am thinking of putting in:

 

Core: 2 x 24 port SFP+ Layer 3 Switch to handle all inter-VLAN routing (looking for recommendations for this)

CAB A: 1 x 48 Port PoE, 1 x 48 Port non-PoE (Ubiquiti USW-Pro-48-POE and Ubiquiti USW-Pro-48 respectively)

CAB B: 2 x 48 Port PoE (Ubiquiti USW-Pro-48-POE)

CAB C: 1 x 48 Port PoE, 2 x 48 Port non-PoE (Ubiquiti USW-Pro-48-POE and Ubiquiti USW-Pro-48 respectively)

CAB D: 1 x 48 Port PoE, 2 x 48 Port non-PoE (Ubiquiti USW-Pro-48-POE and Ubiquiti USW-Pro-48 respectively)

 

The above, excluding the core but including all SFP's and interconnects needed, comes to around £6.5k, leaving around 3.5k for the core - ideally it would be closer to 2.5k if possible.

 

First off, does the above seem sensible (a bit of a sanity check would be great... as I said in a previous post I have not kept up to date on infrastructure for a while).

 

Secondly, what budget but high quality recommendations do people have for the Core? This will be for connecting our virtual infrastructure to, providing aggregation to the cab rooms and performing the usual L3 functions.

 

Any advice people can give, even pointing out obvious omissions / considerations I have missed, would be greatly appreciated! Hoping to do this ourselves, avoiding the expense of professional services if at all possible.

 

Regards,

Michael

[Rob_D]

Pricing seems reasonable to me. Based on the prices we got last year, it would cost about £7.5k to it using Aruba, and Ubiquity tends to be a bit cheaper than HP/aruba.

If you're looking at fiber links between the switches, don't forget the SPF modules (although the unifi ones are on £20 a pop so shouldn't overly effect your budget).

[CyBeRkId2002]

Hi Rob,

 

Thanks for that... What were your 7.5k costs for? Prices about factor in the all the modules needed ... Just not the core switch to put them in 😜

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Or is your 7.5k figure based on like for like with the kit I have spec'd above?

[Rob_D]

Or is your 7.5k figure based on like for like with the kit I have spec'd above?

 

Yeah, 7.5k for the edge switch configuration you're planning, using the aruba 6100 pricing we got for our upgrade last summer, as a general price comparison. What you're specking looks pretty solid to me.

 

The other thing that came up from our upgrade, do a connection audit and rationalization before you spec up your switches. We managed to free up a whole 48 port switch from one cab by unpatching all the unused connections.

[CyBeRkId2002]

Yeah, I have already done that in the numbers above! The actual wastage on our infrastructure when it was originally put in via a consultant (flood patching everywhere) is frightening! We are going from 11 switches to 3 in some of our cab rooms!!!!

 

Thanks for the figures - much appreciated! Can I be nosey and ask one final question - what model Aruba did you go for in the core and what were the rough figures on this?

[Steve21]

To give you a comparison our Aruba chassis bought last year

 

5406r chassis (6 modules) £1250

700w psu £230 x2 - £460

Management module £600 (for redundancy)

20 Poe + 4 10gb module £950 each

 

So for a 2 psu 2 management and 2 module you could be talking down to about what 4.2k for a fully redundant setup with 40 Poe and 8x 10gb uplinks for 2 to each cab

 

Steve

[CyBeRkId2002]

Thanks for that... definitely need to speak to an Aruba specialist I think.

 

Either way I think it is going to work out considerably more costly than a pair of these which is my other serious consideration at present. Price seems unbelievable for the features:

 

https://www.fs.com/uk/products/108710.html?attribute=5271&id=229996

[jonnykewell1]

The one thing I would add is that the wait time at the minute for Aruba is long (at least on our latest quote). The switches we are looking at are on a 24 week lead time.

[CyBeRkId2002]

Ouch.... that's not a deal breaker - but does delay my plans slightly!

 

With regards the FS.com switch - what am I missing? It seems to do everything a small/mid-size secondary would need, plus an awful lot more, at a ridiculously reasonable price! If I am comfortable with the CLI (looks close enough to Cisco for me) is there anything else that should significantly put me off?

[Steve21]

Generally it’s like any 3rd party items, will they do what you want 99% of the time Yep, but if/when it breaks will you have the support to fix it? Maybe!

 

Same kind of thing like why a lot of people have an expensive core with unifi at edge, because of the reliability side of things

 

But you’re right you won’t beat it price wise, same as FS transceivers at a 10th of the price of real ones you can just buy spare if needed

 

Steve

[StephenPink]

Just to add - another vouch for the FS transceivers. The money saved there allows you to keep a reasonable supply of spares, with plenty of change - and I've had no issues. Used them across my secondary school, 10Gb ones for the backbone, and several 25Gb for the links between cores (using Aruba switches). Genuine ones are ludicrous prices!

 

Cheers,

Stephen

[Jcx500]

Can also say the FS receivers are great with Aruba gear

 

Arubas instant on range is also great value for the price

[ITGURU]

Go for a switch stack for your core. offers greater flexibility and redundancy if one switch dies rather than a chassis. currently have a 10gb ring between 4 switches, 2 coppers and 2 sfp switches so if lose one switch still have full redundancy with 2 x fibre links to edge (one from each switch) and servers 2 and 2 in the copper switches. All managed from Single IP interface.

[Tefters]

Just replaced our entire HP network which was very old for mixture of 24 and 48 port POE Ubiquiti USW-Pro's (about 30-35 edge switches). I will warn you now, the 48 port POE's are deep so check your cab sizes!

 

As for our 2x HP ZL core switches we had which had 24 port POE modules, 24 SFP modules and a 10GB SFP module we replaced them with some 48 port POE USW-Pro's and 2x USW-Pro-Aggregation.

I erm'd and arr'd about this for a long time then just took the punt and would highly recommend. The USW-Pro-Aggregation throughput is nuts and we uplinked them both with 2x 25gb links.

 

The Ubi kit is fantastic for the cost of owndership you pay and while yes it doesn't match the likes of Aruba or Cisco toe to toe for overall finish and polish its pretty damn close at less than 1/4 of the cost with no yearly license and the management software is all free!

Is it perfect = no

Does the mangement software have some qwerks = yes

In terms of redundancy we just have 1 of each unit spare in our cupboard, at the cost of the units its still nothing in comparison.

 

We have even brought 90 nano hd's ready to install summer to go along with our 1:1 device rollout.

 

Also if you are looking to buy the kit from anyone look up box.co.uk and contact them, their web pricing is nuts and further gave us reduction after getting an email quote and setting up an account. We did 30 satelite switches, 2 aggregation switches, all the modules and fibre patch leads / DAC's + 90 AP's for around £50k.

Edited April 1, 2022 by Tefters

[CyBeRkId2002]

Thanks @Tefters. This is the response I was hoping to hear! Having Ubiquiti at the edge I would love it at the core to have a single unified system! In all honesty, our core is so small all we need to add to my spec above is 2 x Aggregation switches with a mixture of GBe SFP (for servers) and 10gb SFP+ (for uplinks) and I would be done!

 

Do you have VLANs in place? This is the one bit that concerns me as I have read varying reports. Specifically, how are you dealing with IP helpers?

[Tefters]

Yup we do, lots of them!

 

We handle all our VLAN's and Inter-VLAN routing at our firewall which is a Sonicwall NSA 2650.

I did the numbers of paper and our firewall is more than capable of handling the PPS (packets per second) and throughput that the Vlans do.

 

The Ubiquiti layer 3 routing at present would of had to of been done at CLI, saved and exported as there is no way to do it in the web gui at present and settings dont persist past reboot/power loss.

I did test this and its not bad but at the same time its not great either.

 

I would strongly recommend against the Ubiquiti USW dream machine pro, aka their firewall/router. Its aimed at homes/small busineses.

 

The reason with use the Sonicwall is ever since I stepped foot into schools 13 years ago I cant stand the ISP doing it and/or the web filtering (Smoothwall for example), i much prefer having full control of it all myself.

 

To give you an idea - We are a secondary school of 1300 students and 200 staff with all the usual ammounts of kit flying around.

[CyBeRkId2002]

Hmmm... Food for thought.

 

I have been relatively happy with our ISP's managed firewall (an onsite Fortigate appliance) so hadn't considered also switching this, but may explore a little more.

 

Out of curiosity:

 

Do you just have one of these, or two setup for redundancy? Would worry about our infrastructure would be dependent on a single appliance

Does the SonicWall VPN have the option to use Azure for MFA? If I can get some added benefits out of switching then that might be another consideration all together.

[CyBeRkId2002]

Strange that the features for L3 are there and can be configured, but are held back due to software limitations! It is our core that most needs the upgrade, otherwise I would be tempted to just hold fire for another year and see what happens with the Ubiquiti stuff!

 

The more I look, the more appealing those FS switches are becoming with no major downside.

[Tefters]

Out Sonicwall does not as its EOL but I believe some of the newer models do.

We use to run redundancy everywhere but the costs were getting out of control so i decided to go single product and to this day have not had an issue which made me go "wish i had redundancy on that".

 

Servers and that yes, but switches/firewall I can get my hands on next day easily and I back up configs every half term.

In the case of the ubiquiti pro switches they are so cheap I have a spare 24, 48 and aggregate sitting in a box in a cupboard. Sonicwall I can pickup next day from a fair few online supplier and it would be a new model/version and simply chuck the config file back in (Sonicwalls are very good for this).

 

If I was a business that could not warrant downtime due to losing hundreds of thousands every minute I was offline than that would be different but if our core switch of firewall went down for a day we could still survive.

 

In short - Education budgets are tight and the cost of Aruba, Cisco, Juniper are astronomical and their yearly licensing costs are a joke. I need my budget to go around not just about cover networking.

Ow and dont forget all the ubiquiti pro kit is 1gb client, 10gb uplinks and in the case of the aggregates its 10gb uplinks (28 to be precise) with 4x 25gb uplinks! The throughput is nuts and our network has gone from 0 to zoom! Watching SCCM builds fly down the network now is so pleasing to the eye!

 

I was very nervous and apprehensive about making the jump to a manufacturer like Ubiquiti from the likes of HP but technologies have changed and both me and my colleague are impressed with them and glad we made the jump. Its time the big names start to have some of the market pulled back from them.

Edited April 1, 2022 by Tefters

[CyBeRkId2002]

Final quick question - do people have recommendations of suppliers for us to contact who many be interested in quoting on a project such as this.

[MartinT]

Switchshop have been good to us.

[Rob_D]

+1 for switchshop.

[Tefters]

https://www.box.co.uk/ - Just setup an account and buy the kit, they came in way cheaper then other sellers.

[Katy]

Just wanted to throw in a "+1" for the 5406 as the core, previous workplace we put one in over summer 2012 and it's been rock solid (and still running when I left in January this year).

[slugshead]

Can also say the FS receivers are great with Aruba

 

Our last batch from FS got caught up in customs and we had to pay import.

 

They don't hold UK stock. Bought from gbics.com since, twice the price but next day delivery and no hidden costs...

 

 

on topic though

 

I use a 5412r as the core, 5406rs around the campus in "distribution hubs" and 2530/2540's in all the cabs

Edited April 5, 2022 by slugshead