Hi All,
This is my first post in the Spiceworks community.
I have recently started working at a non-profit school in Souther California that has two campuses.
Each site has approximately 150+ machines, and we are looking at expanding the network to handle our growing needs and future projects (ie Student/Teacher/Public? Wifi, VOIP, BYOD)
Before we do this however, we desperately need to update our network infrastructure from the ground up.
The campuses are quite big with 5-7 building on each property.
Both networks are a hodge podge of unmanaged switches ranging from Dell, Netgear, Trendnet, etc (that are 5-10 yrs old) and Sonicwall Routers and are setup as a bus topology (daisy chained).
One of my first projects for this summer is to re do the network infrastructure to a star topology and eliminate all of the smaller switches we have hidden everywhere.
After that I want to buy all new distribution and core switches, preferablly POE for AP's, Cameras, and Phones (if the cost isnt too high)
I have a good friend that is in the network industry and swears by Cisco.
He recommended 3560X for our core, ASA 5505 firewall, and 2960S distribution switches.
I would love to go Cisco (I am looking at getting my CCNA by the end of this year), but it is hard for me to justify spending that much money, when we might be able to go with another brand (ie HP and Juniper) for a lot cheaper and get the same or close to the same performance and productivity.
We have a very tight budget that I have to stay within, but I want to get something that will last us the next 5+ years.
What are some of your recommendations?
- Joe