Hi, ...on Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 11:50:20AM -0400, Bill Chmura wrote:
> Ethernet wise, currently the whole mess is at 100MB... It will be that > way at least for 12 months after this. As far as heavily used, I just > got on the scene myself and the usage is way down. School, summers > off. But the end of the year is crazy for them network wise. So in > the end, all I can say at this point is that its barely running at peak > usage on 100MB. As others suggested, getting a decent switch with VLAN support and using a single GigE trunk to you router might be a good start (and even cheaper as a bunch of 4-port GigE cards). I don't think you will run into bandwidth problems on the trunk if everything is at 100mbit now, and you will just have much more flexibility with the segmentation. You can still push high-volume VLANs to another trunk port (or dedicated links to the router) later, if that turns out to be neccessary. Also, will all the traffic really pass the router, or will much of it be local to the respective segments? Thinking about how to redesign the network to reduce the load on the router might be a good idea. Alex.
