Rob,
My first question for you is your budget, Fiber Channel is not a cheap solution. There are other forms of Fiber but Fiber Channel is a good price/performance one, yet it is not inexpensive as compared to CAT5.
On Jan 2, 2005, at 11:22 PM, Rob Carruthers wrote:
Can anyone tell me about Fibre optic cables and ethernet.
I want to link two buildings approx 200m, I have been told that is too long for standard CAT5 and wireless is too slow at the moment. We run a Backup server over night and need 1000Mbs to get the Backups done before morning (Retrospect).
Fiber Channel runs at 2Gbps per interface and can be run in tandum, meaning that a computer with a dual channel FC card can acheive 4Gbps in theory. We are preparing to deploy FC uplinking servers to our RAIDs, each Xserve will have a FC card that has dual connections to the FC switch. The dual connections both boost the speed and give fail-over, if one goes down the other connection will still operate although performance will decrease.
Can I run the Fibre between the buildings to join two switches and run CAT5 to the computers?
Yes and this is probably the most practical way to go. Running FC to everything is probably not needed and is certainly cost prohibative.
Are there special requirements for the switch?
Yes, they need to have fiber channel uplink ports or be able to except fiber channel modules. Generally you choose a good Layer 3 switch.
What speed can I expect ?
Depends on the Gbics used (these are essentially adapters that plug into the switch, the FC itself goes into them). Generally they come in 1Gbps, 2Gbps, and 10Gbps.
Is the performance of fibre effected by power cables like CAT5?
Off hand I want to say yes but honestly not sure.
We have 6 G4s (1000Mbs) currently running through a switch (1000Mbs) and 2 eMacs, a couple of PCs and 3 Printers running on another switch (100Mbs).
Initially there will only be 2 Macs (1000Mbs) in the new building but more will follow.
All Macs running 10.3.7 and PCs Win XP.
Any info would be helpful.
CISCO makes very nice switches but you pay for the name. I do not myself mind 3COM switches but they are considered lower end, I have one I have used in my home ... actually looking to get rid of it now as I do not need anything that robust for my home anymore. HP makes some very nice ones and I tend to favor their stuff for commercial environments.
If you want to chat it over with someone, I would say call the Apple business rep. (just call the sales number on their website) and ask to schedule a call with a systems engineer. You can pick his brain regarding the necessary pieces and such, Apple sells some nice switches on their website. I would also do this with HP or another vendor you tend to like.
Hope that helps some.
David
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