[bwillford]

Hey guys would appreciate a few opinions on my current project. I currently have a t1 line coming into my building, going into my firewall then going into my 24 port hub. From there it goes out to all my work stations. We are in the process of connecting another building to our warehouse roughly 200 feet from this building. I need to run data and phones to there. For the data I was hoping to run a cat5 cable from our hub in building 1 to a hub in building 2 and then spreading out to the workstations. There is going to be roughly 10 workstations in building two all accessing the internet and doing quite a bit of remote desktop. Would that cat5 backbone provide enough bandwidth for those 10 workstations? What are my other options? I realize fiber would be the best option but quite pricey and would like to avoid it if possible. Would there be any way to run 3-5 cat5 cables from building 1 to building 2 and connect into 1 router to make a much larger backbone? Is that possible with only 1 hub at each location? Thanks

[Advertisements]

a fiber backbone would be the absolute best...but in lieu of that....you should probably think about getting some managed switches instead....with most modern switches you can create LAG groups...LAG stands for Link Agregation Groups....which basically group X amount of ports on the swtich (you can configure this) into a single port..

so let's say you've got two 24 port gigabit switches...one in the new building and one in the old...you could create a LAG with ports 21 through 24 on both switches...then make sure that those 4 ports are connected to each other in both switches

now in ports 1 through 20 of switch2 (the one in the remote building) you've got desktops connected....in a normal setup...you'd only have a single port connecting the two switches (or multiple ports acting as single ports)....now that you've got a LAG set up...you've got 4 that are going to act as one...so instead of a single gigabit connection between the two switches...you've effectively got a 4 gigabit connection between the switches

[dsenette]

a fiber backbone would be the absolute best...but in lieu of that....you should probably think about getting some managed switches instead....with most modern switches you can create LAG groups...LAG stands for Link Agregation Groups....which basically group X amount of ports on the swtich (you can configure this) into a single port..

so let's say you've got two 24 port gigabit switches...one in the new building and one in the old...you could create a LAG with ports 21 through 24 on both switches...then make sure that those 4 ports are connected to each other in both switches

now in ports 1 through 20 of switch2 (the one in the remote building) you've got desktops connected....in a normal setup...you'd only have a single port connecting the two switches (or multiple ports acting as single ports)....now that you've got a LAG set up...you've got 4 that are going to act as one...so instead of a single gigabit connection between the two switches...you've effectively got a 4 gigabit connection between the switches