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OK Network Plan?

I have a network with static internal IPs 192.168.1.x and

192.168.5.x. Because of some hard coded programs, we don't want to redo the IPs. What the company has is pix at the door, and a 2621 to get for 5.x to 1.x. All pcs and servers have the router's IP(5.x or 1.x) as a GW and the router has the next hop as the inside of the PIX to go out to the web. Does this sound like an efficient setup? I am budgeting for next year and wonder if I could do this better with different hardware. Thanks so much for your help.
Reply to
jfalken
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How many boxes do you have on each network? What is the general network utilization? Any performance issues today? How much growth or change do you expect in the next 2-3 years, and what is it?

Reply to
Trendkill

Right now the 1.x is at about 200 boxes and the 5.x is 100 boxes. I suppose we could bring on a max of about 20 additional per year based on past growth. Currently there are no obvious traffic problems. Faster is always better and I am gearing up for more need because of video conferencing use rising for instance. Any thoughts? Thanks for your help!

Reply to
jfalken

Are the 1.x and 5.x networks on the same switches? Or each goes back to the 2600 separately? What is your switch design like? One switch for each network? If that is the case, and you have gig uplinks to the router, then it sounds like you have a fine design for a small network. You could use switch/router upgrades if you need gig to the desktop and optimal throughput. A 2600 probably isn't going to handle maximum uplink speed between the networks, but should be fine for the majority of small network traffic. In my opinion, if you upgrade to anything, it would be a layer 3 switch or two, and get rid of the 2600 altogether just because its not necessary to keep separate network function devices with a network of only 2-300 nodes. However this can be a costly decision, and for now, it sounds like you are fine with what you have presuming you have port capacity. If you run out of addresses in one of the networks, just turn up a new /24 on one of the switches and you should be gold.

Reply to
Trendkill

Right now, the servers(Novell and MS) are set to the 1.x network along with the majority of PCs. They are spread across several 10/100 Nortel switches with the main switch holding the servers, crossover cables to each of the switches below, cable to the inside of the PIX and cable to the 1.x side of the 2621 router. The 5.x side of the

2600 is cabled into a Nortel 10/100 switch with other cascading switches' crossover cables. I have decided that this year all switches we buy for replacement of additional floors will be 10/100/1000 Nortels, so Gig will be possible at somepoint. Finally, does this sound good or is it better to have a free for all scenario with all the PCs getting a 172.16.x.x number (possibly DHCP) and leave the servers and printers at 192.168.1.x? Thanks again.
Reply to
jfalken

The idea to look at a layer 3 switch as a distribution switch is a good suggestion made by Trendkill

Cascading switches is general not a good idea for several reason - makes troubleshooting more difficult and intermediate switches have to handle unnecessary traffic.

Better to setup "access" switches ( any good layer 2 switch will suffice) homed to a single layer 3 switch ( could have dual switches in future for redundancy). This setup scales well - simply increase the size and horsepower of the layer 3 distribution switch.

BTW broadcast traffic with 200 devices could be significant - better to have smaller VLANS of say no more than 50-60 devices

Reply to
Merv

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