In designing the LAN for Royal Palm we decided to
spend the money first in developing a quality backbone that will allow
for all the bandwidth required for present needs and for future needs
within the next 10 years.
We
put in a gigabit backbone, both fiber and copper.
The fiber, which connects all buildings to the MDF, is 6 pair of
single mode fiber. It
connects all 15 structures in the school; two of which will be lit and 4
will be terminated but left dark. This
will provide scalability for future bandwidth.
The interior of each building will have backbone cabling of CAT6
Gigabit copper. Although
for now each run to the classrooms will be 100MB it can easily be scaled
up to Gigabit when the need arises.
Four runs to each classroom, two of which will go to the
classroom switch, one will be redundant, one to the classroom network
printer, and one to the teachers workstation.
The run going to the teacher’s workstation will not go
through the classroom switch. The
port on the switch in the IDF that the teacher’s run is connected to
will be configured to VLAN2 which will be the ADMIN network
(10.64.16.0).
All other ports will be configured to VLAN1 the STUDENT
network (10.64.32.0).
The
router will provide communication between VLANs with ACLs to provide
security for the ADMIN net.
All
servers will be located in the MDF and all will be located on the
STUDENT net. The only exception to this will be the SASI server, which
will reside only on the ADMIN net.
The access list will block all student access to the ADMIN net
while allowing all access to the STUDENT net.
Each classroom will have a switch no hubs will be used thus
providing for a totally switched network environment.
If broadcasts become a problem in the future, more VLANs will be
created to further segment the network.
The switches in the IDF and MDF are modular and capable of
upgrading or just changing configuration of ports by simply replacing or
rearranging modules.
