I am about to design a LAN for a warehouse, more or less 150 ethernet drops for the whole building. It will not go past this number anywhere soon (can reach 200 drops in 3-4 years, maybe) and budget is really a concern. Most of ports will be used for industrial equipment, phones, CCTV and stuff that could be good even with 100mbit… It’s also very likely that I will be able to squeeze anything in a single closet.
I have two alternatives design in my mind: - two collapsed core in MLAG/VPC, maybe Arista 7050 or Cisco N3K (500 to 1000€) + Arista 7048 / Cisco 3750X for access (<500€ each); - one big chassis like a 6513-e with double supervisor, redundant PS etc (anywhere from 500€ to 3000€). I have seen many of them around in the last months.
I know this does not scale and is not current by any standard, but the reality is that as of today the requirements are very simple: a lot of ports, reliability, VLANs and almost nothing else. No server on-premise but DNS/DHCP, 100Mbit WAN link: almost all the traffic will go to the WAN. Nothing fancy is needed and a router could be added anytime on a stick.
The business consideration is that the break-even should occur within 2-3 years, and after that real money will be spent on networking. May sound strange, but I fully agree with that and I consider this challenge a nice design exercise… what do you think about the proposed solutions?
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