Optic fibre

[Jimmy Lio]

I'm a teacher of a high school.... we are planning to upgrade our network and many propose that we should use optic fibre as the backbone... I'm told to do some study on optic fibre and I hope you guys can lend me a hand:

1. Please some me some pointers on optic fibre for newbie.

2. What are the equipments needed for a network with optic fibre?

3. What is the max. bandwidth of optic fibre?

4. Compared to Gigabit network, which is more feasible? I know that I can increase the bandwidth between two GB switches simply by connecting them with several more twisted pair cable? Isn't it a much more cheaper solution? (but our school network would probably cover a distance over 100m... )

5. We want a lot of bandwidth because we want to implement Video on Demand so that teachers in the classroom can give video presentation to the kids (and I want very much the video is in MPEG2 or MPEG4)... If we have over 300 workstations, how many workstations do you think the network can support? (another solution is to have the video loaded beforehand... in this case it would be loading GBs of data...)

6. For those network experts out there... would you please share your experience on setting up such network?

Jimmy

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I haven't done much with Fiber yet, but I know that it does provide good bandwidth.

Try checking out Black Box (http://www,blackbox.com). They sell networking equipment, but often times they have REALLY good tutorials about the technology they sell. I managed to get one of their catalogs for free, but the cover price on them says that it costs $25 US. Even still, I think the information is worth it for that price!

[Radar]

My advice is to look for grant / state $$ and hire a professional group to sort out all that. They will do the network design and sub contract out the cabling work. I assume that you are going to want cat 5 to all 300 stations? That is a rather involved job there, especially considering that distances greater than 100M will require an IDF with some sort of backbone between it and the MDF. Most likely fiber is the way to go.

[Jimmy Lio]

IDF and MDF... what are they?

[Radar]

Main distribution frame and intermediate distribution frame. Basically the IDF is a remote wiring closet which has a backbone connected switch and station cat5 cables punched down going out to the PCs. The MDF has backbone connected switches and the fiber does a star pattern out to the IDFs. It can be somewhat more complicated with redundancy built in and all that. But the basic is that.

[jonas_larson]

Hi Jimmy,

When you say optical backbone you can get pretty much any speed you want!

The only problem is the cost, it's much more expensive then Gigabit ethernet...

But if mony is no problem go for the optical solution...

If you want Gigabit you will get a 1Gbit(2Gbit very shortly) backbone (server network) for a very reasonable amount of mony. If you need more then 1Gbit you will probably need to upgrade your filer solution aswell! (no point of having a very fast network and slow filers... :-) )

I don't really know how many computers are suppose to run movies/confernce at the same time but with a 1 Gbit network you will get VERY far! (1Gbit ethernet pushes apx. 100MB (85% of max) data per second)

Another option is to have a SAN (Storage Area Network) and connect only the clients that are to run the high bandwidth applications, but even SAN's only run at 2Gbit right now...

SAN's are also quite difficult to administrate and very expensive in comparisement to Gbit ethernet..

Another option is a Gbit directly to your high bandwidth clients... (same speed lower cost, but not possible to have the same distance without a signal enhancer...)


So once again,

A lot of mony = Fiber/Optical backbone/storage

Less mony = Gbit ethernet storage with Gbit...

Hope it helps and doesn't confuse even more... ;o)

Regards

Jonas

[tonimontanna]

Ok,

How much money does one have to spend. Fiber can cost a lot of money. The next question would refer to what routing/switching solutions are you going to use. Probably Cisco.

How many servers do you have.
How many workstations do you have.
Are the workstations and servers located in different rooms?
How far apart are these rooms apart.
What is currently connecting these rooms?

[bradfordgd]

Fibre channel SAN can cost in the ballpark of $1000 per host connection, just for the connectivity, not including the storage itself. Gb Ethernet would be much, much cheaper. I doubt in a high school setting that you would have enough users or bandwidth needs to justify going with Fibre Channel.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by bradfordgd
Fibre channel SAN can cost in the ballpark of $1000 per host connection, just for the connectivity, not including the storage itself. Gb Ethernet would be much, much cheaper. I doubt in a high school setting that you would have enough users or bandwidth needs to justify going with Fibre Channel.

Any particular reason for replying to question such as this that is 15 months old?