topology for 5 story building - cisco

thefunkeymonkey

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Nov 25, 2001
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Im having trouble with a cisco case study. I need to design the network infrastructure for a building with 5 floors. 20 terminals per floor but the top two floors must have wlans as well as networked terminals.

Im not sure on a suitable topology. I thought a tree would be suitable but would just a star suffice?

I also dont know how many switches and patch pannels I would need. Is a switch per floor needed? Would each floor need patch pannels? To connect all the floors together i would imagen a fiber optic backbone would be appropiate.

Is it sensible to have a subnet per floor?

Any suggestions welcome!

Cheers
 

NetCompTech

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Dec 6, 2006
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First, Is there a budget assocaited with this Case?

You would need an IDF on each floor which should have your networking gear inside. Inside would be your patch panel/punchdown block and your switch. Most likely you need only one switch since you only have 20 hosts on the floor and there are 24 port switches out there. Plus you can use a port on the switch to connect your WAP on the top 2 floors.

On the ground floor would be your MDF. Inside you would have your router that connects your switches from each floor, including the first floor switch. The cabling connecting each floor should be fiber.

You could put a subnet per floor. Also, you could divide departments with VLANs if you are that far into the course that you know how to do that.

Not sure if i missed anything, any more questions go ahead and post
 

thefunkeymonkey

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thanks NetCompTech that was a big help. There is no budget with this case study.

Ive opted for an cisco 7500 series router in the MDF with a 10Gbase-SR backbone and cat6 for horizontal cabling. Nice idea with the VLANs, I have touched on VLANs so ill have a crack at implementing them.

Question about the IDFs though, why would you need patch pannels when using a 24 port switch if theres only 20 terminals?

cheers!
 

NetCompTech

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The cabling from each outlet comes into the IDF to a patch panel which allows all the runs to be done first. Now you are just working with smaller patch cables instead of the long cable runs coming out of the cieling. Also, the long runs from the jacks come into the IDF and once punched down are marked for a certain outlet.

It is easier to work with shorter cable runs to networking devices instead of working with the actual run and trying to make it work; ie. if you move a networking device, the cable may no longer reach because it was made a certain length. You don't want to be tugging on that long cable run.

This makes it easier when plugging and unplugging the patch cables from the networking device because you know where the cable is going, and what port it should be plugged into ( if the network is setup this way).