Your Wise Advice for a New Network Setup for a Mixed Use Space/Business

Hi,

I’m setting up a completely new network for a business with between 5-23 staff and potentially up to 50 visitors for large projects and keen for your wisdom on network setup, thanks!

Floor Plan

• The floor is approx. 200sqm with all spaces divided with full wall to ceiling height walls and doors between.
• Network/Comms Room that can accomodate multiple racks and commodity PCS. Into this room, comes 1 Fibre Connection directly from the street (as yet undecided/determined connection rate) and all ethernet from the following, with 23 ethernet cables in total:
• 4 Offices - with 3-4 Cat6 ethernet points per office.
• 1 Reception - 2 Cat6 ethernet points.
• 1 Open Plan Area - 1 Cat6 ethernet point and HDMI for a profector (from wall to ceiling mount). Wifi will be only network/internet access here and should be able to accomodate up to 50 clients.
• 1 Printer Room - 2 ethernet points.

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Client/User Activities

Depending on the client, day of week, etc, these will be a mix of:

1. Coworking/collaborative work between contractors and staff, and of course between themselves - across entire floor, sometimes per office (and open or isolated network eg subnet).
2. Courses and small conferences in the Open Plan Area (as per above - using Wifi - up to 50 clients).
3. Ad hoc call centre operations over VOIP for promotional and product support campaigns - using ethernet in the largest office.

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Core IT Services for Staff and Contractors

All services will be run by staff, but there may be clients who will be given part control of their own services eg creating their own local storage for sharing files within an office.

• Network Management for Internet and LAN.
• Hosting of Web Sites/Apps, Email, and Files.
• Printer Management.

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Specific Requirements

• Local configuration - no cloud management - but preferably having a local management dashboard/interface, and if not, the ability to install one or interface via another box.
• Network isolation by office - some collaboration will require this - and at other times all office ethernet connections will be on the same network.
• Wifi - some groups/contractors will require and ndividual SSID and key - Cisco’s Catalyst 9130 looks perfect?
• VPN and all common remote connection protocol support.
• Minimum recognised support/security vendor reputation (contractors and clients collaborating in the spaces will at times vary from designers to bank and government contractors).

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My Quick Thoughts

My local IT provider has suggested a Cisco Meraki all-in-one router/switch, but I’ve read many poor reviews about Meraki (including in this sub), and it appears to require cloud configuration, which I don’t want.

I’ve considered PFSense or OPNsense boxes as they provide highly granular settings and extensibility, but am unsure of what hardware would be best for them, and whether it may best to run a bigger brand name for, say the edge router and place a pfsense/opnsense box behind it as firewall. Preferably I want to put everything in a single 42U rack to begin with and as the business grows, seperate out internal and external network gear across a few other racks.

Apologies if I’ve used any terms incorrectly or formatted thi badly - my network experience has been setting up web and email servers (*bsds and linux) in a small startup, in the cloud, but not an office setup and one with such mixed use requirements.

I have the time and budget to learn, there will be enough network expertise to run everything locally, and preferably use the network setup in a training capacity for courses in the future.

I am open to your ideas and wisdom, thanks!!!