Greetings, Enterasys gurus! I work for a small private college (limited resources, lots of needs) in northeastern PA. Our network consists of hundreds of ports across 30 mostly small buildings, one big Layer 2 VLAN (because we never got around to segmenting it), and edge switches that are well past their prime. The system has served us well, but it's time for a forklift upgrade, edge to core.
We went through an RFP process, accepting proposals for Brocade, Cisco, Enterasys and Juniper. All four proposals have merit, so the decision process is proving difficult. Our campus is in a rural area, with lots of space between the buildings, and much of our fiber plant is older multimode. We would like each building to have a gig connection back to the data center. However some of the buildings are beyond the typical 500 meter distance limit for gig over multimode. The multimode daisy-chains through some buildings that now have singlemode; so Brocade, Cisco and Juniper have proposed feeding the multimode buildings from them - essentially distributing core functions. Enterasys, on the other hand, offers optics (LC03) that can do gig over multimode for 2 KM, so all buildings would be able to home-run back to the data center. That has its appeal, and I would appreciate some feedback from others using LC03's over long MMF runs. Is that better than keeping MMF runs <500M and distributing core functions to remote buildings? The other thing that attracts our attention is the Netsight suite. We have a small staff, and at times have struggled to troubleshoot anomalies in the switching environment. I have heard from a couple of schools that Netsight really makes a big difference over what they had before. Anyone have good war stories on that? I've gathered that Enterasys employees participate in this list, but I am looking specifically for feedback from users. My apologies if this has been discussed before, but I could not find a link to a searchable archive. Thanks! Charlie Charlie Prothero Chief Information Officer Keystone College Information Technology Building One College Green P.O. Box 50 * La Plume, PA 18440-0200 570-945-8015 --- To unsubscribe from enterasys, send email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe enterasys [email protected]
