Connecting 2 sites using fibre

[spik376]

Please can anybody help with the following issue:

 

At the moment I work at a grammar school in lancashire and we have a secondary school and sixth from about 1.5 miles apart. We have just signed off getting a fibre link between the 2 sites and are now in the process of figuring out what we need to do once the fibre is installed.

 

At the moment the sixth form has a curriculm network and an admin network. The curriculm network uses ip address's 10.68.44.* and subnet mask 255.255.252.0. The admin network stretches over both sites as it is linked by microwave but will be linked by the fibre when it is installed.

 

The secondary school also has a curriculm network and the same admin network as the sixth form. The curriculm network uses address's 10.68.4.* and subnet mask 255.255.252.0.

 

The DNS is different on both sites as we have seperate servers for each network.

 

By linking the sites we want to keep the seperate networks but allow users logged in at one site to be able to access files on their area on the other site. And also allow sixth form students to be able to log in to the secondary school curriculm network.

 

The big question that we need to know is what equipment do we need to buy to be able to link the networks? We presumed a router at either end would do the job or will a layer 3 switch at either end do the job?

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.

[MYK-IT]

One basic / simplest solution, as long as you're installing more than 1 pair of fibre (which i hope so for redundancy/ bandwidth), is to use 1 pair for Admin and 1 pair for Curriculum with a dedicated switch with fibre nic for each network at each end. (i.e. 4)

 

The above may be the most basic / simplest but necessary not the best nor cheapest as doubling up a switches each end. You can of course expand from this and use VLAN, which half the amount of switches each end etc...

 

I'm sure many others will add alternative solutions but just see this as one of many and go with what suits your requirements / budget etc.

Edited November 18, 2009 by MYK-IT

[nicholab]

What circuit type are you getting? If you are getting a WES/LES circuit it is Ethernet. You could then run IEEE 802.1Q trunking over the link. Edited November 18, 2009 by nicholab

[spik376]

Hi MYK-LB

 

Unfortunately upon investigating we are only getting a single pair, we did want 2 pairs but when we had to push the costs down we lost the other pair.

 

What equipment will I need to get now its only a single pair?

[nicholab]

Sorry is this fiber totally under your control are you providing your own optical kit.

[spik376]

The fibre is being installed by H2O networks

 

They are installing the physical cable and we need to buy in the fibre NIC cards and what ever else we need to connect the fibre to the 3 networks. Since we have never done this before we are unsure which equipment we need to buy in to route the correct data to the different networks.

Edited November 18, 2009 by spik376

[mjs_mjs]

The fibre is being installed by H2O networks

 

They are installing the physical cable and we need to buy in the fibre NIC cards and what ever else we need to connect the fibre to the 3 networks. Since we have never done this before we are unsure which equipment we need to buy in to route the correct data to the different networks.

 

surely you just need a router at ither end then?

[mikedoubleu]

Hi Spik376,

 

I think the cheapest method for you would be using a VLAN capable switches at each end and then a router to handle the communication between networks.

 

You have three networks, so you will need to assign 3 VLAN's:

 

Admin Network - iprange - VLAN1

Curriculum1 - 10.68.4.x - VLAN2

Curriculum3 - 10.68.44.x - VLAN3

 

You would then put an appropriate VLAN capable switch ad fibre module at each end. I guess your using single mode fibre to make the link so a HP Procurve 1800-24G on each end with HP ProCurve Gigabit-LX-LC Mini-GBIC (J4859C) to connect to the fibre.

 

Now you can "untag" port 1 on each switch to VLAN1, port two to VLAN2, and port 3 to VLAN3. Port 24 would be connected to the fibre and have all three VLAN's "Tagged" on it.

 

At this stage, you have an ethernet port for each network at each building. You can connect this port to the switch for each relevant network.

 

This gives you the ability to transmit each network over the fibre, but no way to route data between each network so you will need some kind of a router. If your existing router onsite supports multiple VLAN's or has enough managed ethernet ports, this would do the trick. Otherwise any router (or routing switch) with enough ports should be able to cope with the job.

 

Hope this helps

 

Mike

[nicholab]

You could do routing on your core Switch if it supports or get some layer 3 switches.