I have a few wiring bids for an older/old building we occupy. I want to rewire the data portion of the building, but the cost is prohibitive (final decision tomorrow). Currently we have a single gig switch that supports many mini-switches, one mini-switch in each office. We're a small software development shop and have only 15 people, but we have twice that number of computers for development, application building, support, and training. The machines are currently 100Mb/s. The application building machines might benefit from gig access to the servers where test case data is stored.
My guess of the moment is that I will not be rewiring the building. My next guess is to replace all consumer mini-switches with something more commercial. Can someone recommend a more commercial alternative to the multitide of plastic heat sources that I can find in CompUSA or Best Buy?
You don't say why you want to rewire. If the servers are near the gigabit switch, replacing the server NICs with gigabit NICs would be a good start.
Next easiest is to replace the mini-switches, which I assume are
100Mb/s, with gigabit mini-switches. The real answer depends a lot on the traffic patterns, but with gigabit switches you should have enough for full speed 100Mb/s connections between a few machines at once, or from some machines to the servers. It is normally very unlikely for all machines to require full 100Mb/s at the same time, and the servers probably wouldn't handle it well, anyway. (Especially not running windows.)
That should be fairly affordable, though it might be that your current net is fast enough.
The current setup is a central 24 port gig switch (hp 2626) that has each of the ports going to mini-switches in each of the offices. We're a small development shop. Each office has a windows workstation for the developer and at least one other computer used as a build or support machine. In the training room I have nine windows machines that are connected to mini-switches before reaching the main (core) switch.
Instead of a hub-and-spoke I have something more like a fractal snowflake. I wanted to rewire the building (our floor) to run enough drops to each office so that I could eliminate the mini-switches and run every machine directly from the central switch(es). Because of the age of the building with exterior walls of brick and interior walls that are near impossible to fish cables inside, I'm switching to plan B where I keep the existing wiring and replace the mini-switches with something that is more commercial than a linksys 'workgroup' switch.
Looking at newegg I find the SMC and Netgear devices that look interesting. I prefer not to have wall-warts and for the switches to have internal power supplies, but that want may not be practical for switches that are 5 to 8 ports (and in one case it may be a 12 port switch in the training room).
One option is to use wireless, but I don't like that option. When the nightly build happens all source code is mirrored to each build machine, the application built, then there are many test cases with a large amount of data for each test case that must be available for each build machine's test after the build. I do not want to send that much data across a wireless link and I do not want to use a wireless link anyway. I prefer actual wiring and many of the machines are unix boxes that I could not get direct installed wireless cards for anyway.
If a reasonable fraction of the traffic is local to each office, then it is probably fine with 100Mb/s switches. The price for smaller gigabit switches has come down enough, though, that it would seem to make more sense to replace the switches than the cable. One cable at gigabit speed is worth at least 10 running at 100Mb/s.
From an administrative viewpoint, that is probably better. If you don't worry about that, then I don't think it is worthwhile.
My favorite 100baseTX switch has an internal power supply. I don't know if Allied Telesyn makes a gigabit version yet.
(snip)
With wireless at 54Mb/s it sounds good, but that is shared, and it isn't shared as well as ethernet.
Cat5 is supposed to support gigabit, though Cat5e is recommended.
For all but the longest runs Cat5 should be fine. For short runs, gigabit should work through lower grade cable, but there is no guarantee. Gigabit does require all four pairs, though.
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