I am really new to large scale networking and all I know is the basics. I will be doing a network for a huge workspace consisting of multiple offices. There will be a total of 308 Clients, with at least 12 clients per office.
I am following this diagram:
I will be using CISCO SG500-28 Managed Switch as my main switch, where another switch CISCO SG250-18 Managed Switch will tap in.
For ease of installation, I plan to use CISCO SG250-18 Managed Switch for every part or a sector, then Desktop Switches will connect to this.
My question:
- Is this okay?
- Does a cascade of switches affect overall performance?
- Can the last node obtain gigabit file transfer speeds from the other nodes?
- Can the Main Switch handle every client?
Best Answer
Hardly ideal. I assume since you are using cheap, obsolete switches, that you're on a very limited budget. You'll have to weigh the factors below.
The problem with cascading switches is that you are concentrating traffic on the links to upstream switches. For example, the last switch has 26 x 1G ports. So if more than 10 PCs try to download something at the same time, you've maxed out your capacity on that switch. All the upstream switches will also be maxed out before you even consider the PCs attached to them.
Yes, but only if everyone else is not sending any traffic. Otherwise, no.
The main switch has the same problem: your servers are plugged into 1G ports. So that limits how much data they can send/receive. Everyone is competing for a piece of that 1G bandwidth.
Now, all this may be OK if all you're doing is reading and editing Word documents. But if you're doing some sort of transactional processing (payments, reservations, etc.) for a business, this network design may not be sufficient. We can't answer that question for you, and even if we could, it would just be our (my) opinion, which is off-topic here.