Networking question for a buddy...

[Greco101]

Your employer currently runs a network consisting of Cat 5e cabling with 1000baselx fiber connecting two closets to your router/firewall; a brand new Cisco device with 5 Gigabit ports on the LAN side. The switches employed are Nortel Baystack 450s with cascade modules connecting a 3 switch stack and a 2 switch stack in the two closets. Your servers are IBM Netsevers with 10/100 NICs and your workstation base consists of Dells with 10/100 NICs and 8 acer laptops with both 10/100 NICs and 802.1g wireless adapters. The wireless laptops connected through 2 linksys access points running 802.11g. Your internet/WAN connection is a full T4. Your employer wishes to upgrade to a Gigabit Ethernet network in order to speed up the transfer of very large (several Gigabyte sized) image files internally and to a client site. Your job is to detail the necessary changes to accommodate that upgrade and any issues, or bottlenecks, that may reduce your ability to meet that goal, either internally, or over the WAN.


I was thinking switch to 100baseT cat6e and swapping the NIC's out for 10/100/1000 or even 10,000. I'm not familiar at all with networking so I figured I'd post here just incase my friends dad doesn't know either.

Thanks guys.

[simon275]

Yeah swap the nic's over in the servers to 10/100/1000 would be good.

Now in the wifi front if they want to move files faster I guess they could upgrade to draft 802.11n.

The main backbone seems reasonably solid as upgrading the Fiber would be very expensive so I would say leave it as is. The switches are a bit old but I believe they support 1000baseT

For short connections you can get away with cat 5 but cat 6 would be better.

It really depends on how much there is available to spend.