Hello,
I have a school building that is very large and long, as it has had many additions over the years. Before my time here it was setup as a daisy chain of uplinks between each IDF, which ends up being around 8 hops by the time you get to the other end of the building. This wasn't a problem till devices grew on the network, then it became very slow and other services had problems. Even with vlans and QoS profiles set, voip calls drop and intranet services are slow.
From the MDF to each IDF is old multimode 1Ge fiber that is connected to all Extreme Networks switches, mainly x440's or x460's.
I would like to install new fiber runs from a new MDF location to each IDF, instead of the current daisy chain to eliminate hops. That way there is just one hop to the MDF. Due to budget cuts as a result of the pandemic, we will have to do this as cheap as possible and maybe a phased approach.
I am thinking that we could buy pre-terminated fiber and run that to the locations ourselves and cut out hiring a company to do the work. My problem is I don't know what type of fiber to install. We would like to go to 10Ge, but if I am installing new fiber I will need it to work with my existing 1Ge switches and their SFP ports. If I install single mode it won't work with my existing switches as they can only do multimode. Unless I just get the single mode cable installed and wait for the money to become available for new switches to run it.
If money becomes available later in the year, I would like to buy new switching at each location to support 10Ge uplinks. Extreme switches run about 3k and you have to pay another $500 just to enable 10Ge on SFP+ ports. I am happy with Extreme's products but we are also in a budget crunch. Does anyone have recommendations on switching that may lower the cost but also get us to 10Ge?
Any advice would be appreciated, thank you!
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