Switch for sharing 1GB Internet with up to 70 tenants.

SiriusB

SiriusB

SiriusB

Soldato
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I have been asked to find some hardware options for sharing a 1GB connection with up to 70 tenants in a building. Unfortunately I do not have a lot of details at this point, and have only been asked for ideas - rather than concrete specifications.

The requirements we have are to be able to separate each tenant's traffic from each other, rate limit their bandwidth up and down and monitor each tenant's usage.

From that I have figured we need a switch or switches that provides VLAN support and rate limiting on a per-VLAN basis. I am under the impression most modern switches has provision to allow monitoring of bandwidth. The only limitation I have been given is a desire for HP products over Cisco - though as said nothing is set in stone.

Unfortunately, and as you may be able to tell, this is not in my current skill set so hence this thread. Any advice on hardware or what I should be looking for would be a great help. Corrections to my assumptions would be nice too! :)

No real budget at the moment, but I think a ballpark figure of 2-3K was suggested [so 1-1.5K per switch if more than one is required].

Thanks all! :)
 
At that price have fun, I can think of Cisco, Juniper and maybe brocade gear which will do the job alright, but sensible equipment is £3.5-4k per switch. It's a complex area and unless you know what you're doing then don't, you're going to have really complex queuing and policing issues. I'd likely use Juniper EX4200 units if it was me, I know they can do the job but cheap they aren't.

You're also basically playing the ISP game so allow for management and support systems too (DNS, email, etc)
 
I have already stated I am out of my depth, so no surprise to hear it from you too! :p

I am suspecting this is a cost finding mission before we go ahead and do anything. I will also assume someone with the necessary skills will be brought in. You have given me some stuff to look at. My boss can take it from there! :)

Thank you for your input!
 
Hmm.. for rate limiting the approach my halls did was to get switches which could be set to 10mbit full duplex. Boom, instant bandwidth limit :P

That said - nowadays that's not huge :(
 
I'd look at something like Cisco 6500's with 48port POE 1gig 10/100/1000 line cards, but that will probably break your budget somewhat. Then you can run Private VLANs to segregate the traffic and then drop the router / interned feed into a shared port so all vlans have access to it. You can then run your queuing / policing QOS from that.

Depends how many ports you need and how much resilience too - dual supervisors on a 6513-e stacked with line cards won't be cheep...
 
Chief Wiggum said:
I'd look at something like Cisco 6500's with 48port POE 1gig 10/100/1000 line cards, but that will probably break your budget somewhat. Then you can run Private VLANs to segregate the traffic and then drop the router / interned feed into a shared port so all vlans have access to it. You can then run your queuing / policing QOS from that.

Depends how many ports you need and how much resilience too - dual supervisors on a 6513-e stacked with line cards won't be cheep...
Click to expand...

You really don't want to do that, not these days, 5 years ago maybe but not today. 6500 is obsolete in virtually all terms, power consumption is horrible, feature set is both massively lacking (policing is basic compared to JUNOS or higher end Cisco gear running IOS-XR) and also over the top here (the 6500 is an MPLS capable core router, the 7600 is merely a derivative of it) and that's not required. Then there's the issue of it being stupidly expensive for what it is.

A 4500/6500 alike box could be done cheaper with a Brocade SX platform for example.

However you also need to consider that this sort of deployment is probably going to require fibre for some of the end users (and if some do, I'd do all of them that way, consistency is important) that'll influence your choice of platform for line cards.

You need to consider resiliency too, if you have a single circuit delivering your gigabit connection then what happens when some idiot doing roadworks puts a digger through it. Even with the best providers that's a day or so to fix, can you (or your users) stand that downtime, bearing in mind it'll be the worst possible time. If you need resiliency you need to decide how much and how you do it - two circuits from one provider, diverse providers, run your own AS???

If you can get away with copper I'd use EX4200s as said because they're low power consumption, they have excellent policing and limiting config and they're stackable to 480 1GigE ports in a single logical stack.

If you need fibre, well I'd almost look at separate fibre media converters, you can get chassis based ones which are cheaper than a SFP line card fully populated by a fair margin, if cost is a concern I'd probably do that, otherwise I'd use a Juniper EX8200 with the SFP line-cards. You could equally use Brocade SX, there are also extreme products which do it, I don't work with them so I can't recommend. If you wanted a modular solution you could look at Cisco metro ethernet products, there are variants of the standard switches in that range designed for these kind of requirements.
 
I'm all for doing a job properly but given the OP suggested a ballpark budget of £1k per switch, suggesting some switches at £3k each is possibly getting carried away (assuming Google hasn't kippered me on pricing)...
 
I'd use Extreme Networks X450a-24x switches, probably stacked configuration. (my personal preference)
BUT they're not cheap. Circa 5k per unit + SPF modues + an XOS Core licence if you want it. (Ships with advanced edge)

Personally, I use them throught the Core of my network and they perform exceptionally well @ 1Gbit and 10Gbit.

You could potentially use just two X450a for core and multiply out the ports using X450e's. (Or some cheaper equivalent from another brand.)

Definitely 1K budget is a bit ambitious, my basic PoE edge switches cost more than a grand for a 1u 48port unit. And they arn't uber, only support 4 proper QoS queues, you should really support 8 throughout for what you're doing, STP implementation is a bit clunky, though do suprisingly support L3/4 policy based QoS/ACLs.

Given there are 70 tennants this is a pretty large office complex so it's worth doing properly, I'd not be looking at much less than 4-5k per switch. IF it's a residential block, then i'd probably approach it slightly differently, as they're not likely to be running a multitude of mission critical services over it, double tagging, and wotnot.
 
Just to clarify the budget: My boss never set a limit as such, he merely suggested that the switches are going to be at the very least 1-2 grand each. Given we need around 70 ports I upped it to 3-4K overall.

However, I completely agree that this could be too low and I passed on the info bigredshark gave to me, including the larger costs to be expected.

Asim, if anything happens with this project I will be happy to try and get a speedtest result :p
 
asim18 said:
OcUK will appreciate it if you could do a speedtest before you start all the networking plz. :D thx
Click to expand...

I hope that's being sarcastic :p

but in case it's not....

I can tell you the results of that right now, 1 Gigabit :)
Leased fibre tails you get what you pay for, if you buy Jigabit you gets Jigabit.
 
#Chri5# said:
I'm all for doing a job properly but given the OP suggested a ballpark budget of £1k per switch, suggesting some switches at £3k each is possibly getting carried away (assuming Google hasn't kippered me on pricing)...
Click to expand...

Well it can't be done for £1k a switch, the equipment simply isn't capable of doing the job....
 
Skidilliplop said:
I hope that's being sarcastic :p

but in case it's not....

I can tell you the results of that right now, 1 Gigabit :)
Leased fibre tails you get what you pay for, if you buy Jigabit you gets Jigabit.
Click to expand...

Unless you buy it from Virgin Media business, in which case you get 300Mb on a 1Gig point to point circuit because their network is, frankly, appalling. That serves as a useful warning about who not to buy from. For internet it's worse, you need to buy from a big provider, far too many small providers sell 1Gig and contend it at transit. Leased lines aren't what they used to be.
 
bigredshark said:
Unless you buy it from Virgin Media business, in which case you get 300Mb on a 1Gig point to point circuit because their network is, frankly, appalling. That serves as a useful warning about who not to buy from. For internet it's worse, you need to buy from a big provider, far too many small providers sell 1Gig and contend it at transit. Leased lines aren't what they used to be.
Click to expand...

Can't say any of our 100mbit point to points have ever suffered that. But maybe they're below the threshold of what their network can handle.
The only 1Gbit line we have with VM both ends are barely more than a mile apart so probably not a lot of core network traversed on that one :P
 
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