Extend multiple CAT5e cables

[Moltuae]

I've got 24 CAT5e cables, presently running 80 Metres or so.

They all need to be extended to run another 60 or 70 Metres.

What would be the best/neatest/cheapest way to extend them, while retaining the full 1 gig bandwidth?


(All cables presently terminate at the same point, where power is available).

 

[AndyM]

48 Port unmanaged or smart switch depending upon the location. I'm still partial to HP when it comes to switches. Little HP 1810-48G should work nicely.

Andy

 

[Moltuae]

Thanks Andy!

I've been working with the HP 1820-48G Managed Switches a lot lately. So, are the 1810s unmanaged then? And wouldn't a managed switch be better?

I considered using a switch, but it just seems wrong to combine them all together into one switch. I was wondering if there was some kind of 24 way extender available; something that keeps each cable run separate. I know I could use 24 separate extenders, but that would get kinda messy, not to mention expensive.

 

[AndyM]

1810 is smart managed. I've got an 1810-24G in the office. Works really well.

Thought about the extenders, but figured that they would all need to be powered, and you wouldn't really know if there was a break in the run if one was disconnected. With the switch, it just seemed the logical choice, and the 1810's support port mirroring, as well as VLANs, Spanning Tree and Link aggregation trunking.

Haven't used the 1820's

Andy

 

[Moltuae]

Makes sense, thanks.

The 1820s are great switches, but probably a bit overkill for this. I'll take a look at the 1810s, they sound perfect.

 

[AndyM]

48 port = £295 Ex Vat (J9660A)
24 port = £115 Ex Vat (J9803A)

If you've got room for 2, and want to save £65....

Andy

 

[Markverhyden]

Have you considered fiber? Much simpler with SFP's. That's pretty much what every site is see has for extensions these days. If there are some serious bandwidth hogs you will still have the same problem running copper as the bottleneck will be the uplink/downlink ports.

 

[Mercenary Roadie]

I'm with Mark, Fiber is your best bet

 

[Moltuae]

Have you considered fiber? Much simpler with SFP's. That's pretty much what every site is see has for extensions these days. If there are some serious bandwidth hogs you will still have the same problem running copper as the bottleneck will be the uplink/downlink ports.

Fibre would be great. I've not worked on fibre much yet (unless you count starting the day with a bowl of All-Bran), so my knowledge of it is a bit limited. I did consider fibre, but the costs still seem rather prohibitive, that is assuming I would need 2 x 10 gig fibre cable runs, plus a 24 way switch (with 2 x 10 gig fibre uplink ports) at each end? ... or is there a better way?

Ignoring any additional cost of running fibre though, I'm still leaning towards CAT5e for a number of reasons:

• The existing 80 Metre runs would probably need to be replaced with fibre too (rather than extend), if we're going to do it properly.
  
• 2 x 10 gig fibre cables still provide slightly less bandwidth than 24 CAT5e cables (on paper at least, though of course it's possible there will be some losses/attenuation in the cables).
  
• 2 fibre cables provide less network resiliency/redundancy than 24 CAT5e cables: If a few CAT5e cables get damaged, there would be hardly any impact on the network but, if just one of the fibre cables gets damaged, we'd lose half of the bandwidth.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

For down and dirty quick....I'll get a pint of Guinness and join Andy with the same pitch...the Procurve 1800 48.
However..there's no wiggle room, and what about future growth?
In ones mind, you have the redundancy of 24 cables....instead of a fiber, BUT you have a switch in the mix now. Granted it's a nice Procurve which should run and last problem free forever...BUT...you never know.

*One thought...you have the price of a 48 port procurve to put in the middle, and the price of running 24 more ~70 foot cables. To compare against the price of running a pair of fiber runs, (two...one for failover). Although fiber should be dang resistant..sleeve it down a chase in the ceiling or whatever and it's solid and durable. With a fiber cable having 3x pair in there...you can trunk two pairs...heck with two fiber cables, you can trunk 4 pair...and get a 4 gig home run. Or kick it up a notch and to 10 gig tranceivers and get a 10 gig backbone. Trunk two for more fun and speed!

What kind of saturation is actually happening on these 24x individual runs? I would put more faith in a lot of those runs sharing a fast fiber highway over a daisy chained long copper run with a switch in the middle.

 

[Moltuae]

Thanks Stonecat.

There's actually a fair bit of wiggle room with 24 cables, and saturation will be quite low for the foreseeable future.

The 24 cables were originally installed with growth in mind, since present usage really only needs a handful of them.

Future usage will probably be something like:

• 6 IP Phones
• 6 Computers (inc 2 cash registers).
• 4 Printers
• 5 IP CCTV Cameras
• 3 WAPs
• 1 NAS (for backups only, requiring 4 aggregated links)

So there will probably be more ports required than the 24 in future, but the bandwidth usage should never get much beyond 50% saturation. The NAS will likly be the heaviest user and most of that usage will be out-of-hours.

As far as switch redundancy goes, I'm thinking 2 x 24 way instead of 1 x 48 way. Ok, so neither switch is strictly speaking 'redundant', since both will be in use most of the time, but it could be planned such that the impact of a single switch failure is minimal. Maybe even something like 2 x 48 switches, with half of the ports left empty on each switch ... re-patched manually in case of failure. Or something on those lines ....

Having said that, I'm all for recommending fibre, if the cost isn't vastly greater.

I've really had very little experience with fibre yet though. My understanding is that to do this over fibre, I'd need a 24 port switch at each end that (ideally) has 2 x 10 gig fibre uplink ports, which would both (presumably aggregated) connect the switches together. Or have I got that totally wrong? What kit would you recommend?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I've really had very little experience with fibre yet though. My understanding is that to do this over fibre, I'd need a 24 port switch at each end that (ideally) has 2 x 10 gig fibre uplink ports, which would both (presumably aggregated) connect the switches together. Or have I got that totally wrong? What kit would you recommend?

You're right on there. Without seeing what you have right now...I'm guessing the existing 24x cables come from a switch? Or from a patch panel? If from a switch at the "source"...you'd be replacing that switch with one (like an 1810-48g...with fiber tranceivers in those 4x ports way on the right side.
And on the other end of the run..the "destination" that you wish to connect "to"...another matching switch. Or if they come from a patch panel...at the source....you'll hang a switch there....and matching one at the destination. Which tranceiver model you want...I don't have that off the top of my head...but will in a few hours as I have to finish a quote on a similar project (that big one I have down in the other sub forum). Different models for the different type of fiber terminations...typically it's "LC".

 

[Moltuae]

Great, thanks!

Patch panel both ends: Far end, just a patch panel directly connected to the equipment. And at the 'business end', patch panel patching into a switch. So, I guess just replace both patch panels with a 24 way switch and link the 2 switches with fibre.

The 1810 SFP ports are a humble 1 gig max, are they not?

Wouldn't I need something like a 2920 with SFP+ ports?

So I'm guessing we're looking at a couple of grand in switches, then about 300 Metres of fibre (plus SFP+ transceivers, etc), whatever those cost.

 

[Markverhyden]

Fiber is not nearly as expensive as people perceive. Over here I can get a 100M Multi mode LC-LC 10GB premade cable for $110 x 2 for redundancy. To run 28 70M drops of Cat6 is significantly higher in both labor and materials.

Yes, you get a switch with uplink ports and plug in the SFP's for fiber. Really the only time I see the media converters is when it's a very long run and it's for just one device, say a kiosk. Even then they could just pop in a switch as needed.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Patch panel both ends: Far end, just a patch panel directly connected to the equipment. And at the 'business end', patch panel patching into a switch. So, I guess just replace both patch panels with a 24 way switch and link the 2 switches with fibre.

The 1810 SFP ports are a humble 1 gig max, are they not?

Hmm...yeah, never looked at 10 giggy on those....you speed freak you....so guess yer stepping up into the 2k series. You probably want more tranceivers than the 2520 has eh. (just 2)
I like patch panels....I'd keep the patch panels there and use nice little 1 or 2 footers to link the switch in.

 

[Moltuae]

Fiber is not nearly as expensive as people perceive. Over here I can get a 100M Multi mode LC-LC 10GB premade cable for $110 x 2 for redundancy. To run 28 70M drops of Cat6 is significantly higher in both labor and materials.

Thanks Mark. I never thought of pre-made cables. Didn't think they'd be available in such long lengths!

Found this UK supplier ... price seems reasonable:
http://www.dttuk.co.uk/product.htm?product=4-Core-Pre-Term-9-125

I'm not entirely sure how many 'cores' I need. So is that 4 cores @ 10 gig? Or would I need two lengths of that stuff for 20 gig?

Hmm...yeah, never looked at 10 giggy on those....you speed freak you....so guess yer stepping up into the 2k series. You probably want more tranceivers than the 2520 has eh. (just 2)
I like patch panels....I'd keep the patch panels there and use nice little 1 or 2 footers to link the switch in.

Thanks. I guess the minimum I need is any 24 port switch with at least 2 x 10 gig SFP+ Ports, whichever the cheapest is really.

So, to work out a rough idea of the cost, we're talking 2 x pre-made fibre (or is that 1 x 4 core?), 2 switches and 4 SFP+ modules/transceivers to plug into the empty SFP+ slots in the switches, right?

 

[AndyM]

Have a look at CableMonkey. They're owned by Connectix, who make fantastic cables! (Most of the BT cables are made by Connectix. CableMonkey is the retail arm, but contact Connectix for pricing as you'll get better pricing)

http://www.cablemonkey.co.uk

http://www.connectixcablingsystems.com/

Andy

 

[Mercenary Roadie]

You keep talking about wanting to keep the 1gig bandwidth of each cable. What is the current switch that you are using and what is feeding it at what speed? Are you even sure your current set-up is running at 1gig of throughput per cable?

 

[Moltuae]

You keep talking about wanting to keep the 1gig bandwidth of each cable. What is the current switch that you are using and what is feeding it at what speed? Are you even sure your current set-up is running at 1gig of throughput per cable?

Thanks.

I don't think it was a point I reiterated at all, but it was something I mentioned in my first post. Thinking about it now, it probably wasn't the best way to phrase what I meant. I accept there's always going to be some losses over longer distances, I just meant I'd like to keep somewhere near the gigabit speeds and I don't want a solution that introduces contention or a substantial reduction in performance.

Some of the equipment is yet to be installed, but yes, generally there's a high throughput throughout, with 1 gig cabling between all devices, fairly high end HP switches and multiple aggregated connections between switches, servers and network storage.





I think I'm now leaning towards the fibre route, once I can get my head around what exactly it is I need. I'll post back once I've figured that out!

Thanks for all the help so far guys!

 

[Moltuae]

Ok, after some research, I think I'm beginning to understand what it is that I need now to make this work with fibre ...

Will this work?:

Switches:

2 x Cisco SG500X-24 Switches.

(would've preferred HP, but these seem to be the lowest priced enterprise-grade switches with SFP+ ports).
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SFP+ Modules:

4 x Cisco SFP-10G-SR Compatible 10GBASE-SR Multi Mode Fibre SFP+ Modules (LC Connector)​

Pre-made Fibre Cable:

Still a little confused here ...
I now understand the difference between single-mode and multi-mode and I'm pretty sure it's the latter I require. OM3 would seem to be the most suitable, due to the length required (150m-200m) and I know I need LC connectors both ends (to match the SFP+ modules.

What I don't quite understand is the number of cores required. Will a single 4-core fibre cable provide 2 x 10 gig connections, or do I need 2 cables for this?

Oh, and I'm also wondering if I'll need 'loose tube' armoured cable. The fibre will be buried, but inside plastic ducting, not directly.

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