How to Cope with Physical Distance between Clients and MDCs?

[JesusAli]

Hello Everyone,

My question today is such:

What do you do when the MDCs, RAIDs and FC Switches are in one physical location, but the Clients and Metadata Switch are in another physical location?


At our small art college, we have a server room located at the end of one hallway.

We have many classrooms, computer labs and offices. The Ethernet ports in those rooms resolve to switches in different "TC" Tech Closets around the school. These are generally 24-48 port 100BT Cisco switches with 1GB fiber or cat6 uplinks.

The uplinks head back to the main Server room.


The challenge we're facing is that the MDC's are in this Main Server room (because that is where the Fiber is terminated), but the 15 workstations in the Classroom will have BOTH their Ethernet cords plugged into ports inside the classroom, which are connected to Switches in a different room, "TechCloset-A".

The main switch (for the General Network) is only 100BT.
The additional swtich (for metadata) is 1000BT.

Since 15 metadata ports terminate in TC-A it makes sense to physically locate the 1000BT metadata switch there.

But the problem is, how should we get the two Metadata connections from the two MDC's back from the Main Server room, into the 1000BT metadata switch in TC-A?


Have any of you dealt with something like this? I would imagine it is quite common.

Any recommendations on how to proceed are appreciated. Thanks!

[abstractrude]

All these problems can be solved. whats your situation with the fibre. are all your clients in the room good to go as far as fibre networking to the storage? I

Your going to do what a lot of people on this site don't like but it is perfectly fine when done correctly. You need to use VLANS and trunking between the two switches to make this go down. Remember latency is key not overall bandwith.

Have your clients connect to the switch with a VLAN just for metadata. Use fibre or multiple copper connections to trunk the two switches together. The metadata controllers and the clients are on a private vlan and boom your good to go.

This is of course gonna requre the assistance of your network group.

[JesusAli]

thanks, abstractrude.

So you're saying that you can make VLANs ACROSS switches? Interesting.

So I would need to snatch two ports from a 1000BT switch in the Main Server room, put the MDC's on those two ports, and then connect the fiber between the TC-A 1000BT Switch and the borrowed two ports in the Main Server room...

That sounds like a lot of IT work for the networking.

In your opinion, are VLANs difficult to setup/maintain?
I'm just curious about how much screaming and gnashing of teeth I should prepare for when I ask IT for this.

[abstractrude]

Well. Your in education... So IT might be nice and look at it as something interesting to do. Or they might be losers that can't HAVE A GOOD TIME and won't help you. Either way it is possible to do. Cisco uses something called trunking where VLANS are passed between switches. The fact is packets coming off the port have a specific VLAN tag that points them in the right direction. There are many technical points that im leaving out but you get the picture. Your infrastructure is probably already VLANed up. It is very rare that large networks dont use VLANS. It is just too difficult and often impossible to segment your network on a strictly physical method.

Anyway there are a few ways to get the traffic between the switches, you can use fibre or just multiple dedicated ethernet lines and bond them into a channel. Make a good justification, if they say no. Go to someone who can make decesions. If you already bought all your XSAN gear who are the guys in IT to tell you no.

remember latency is key. look at CVsummary and ping times. make sure they dedicate a private VLAN for the metadata. have them turn off extra traffic, kill dhcp servers and layer 2 cisco traffic. You can make it work for you. I have done it with more complicated setups, including sending metadata through a WAN, and yes it worked.

Implemented correctly I would rather have your cisco setup than some shit netgear switch.

[matx]

We should all carefully consider the wise words of this Xsan master, since he usually knows what he's talking about, and he has very colourful language.

[JesusAli]

For the record, and because they may be reading this, I am confident that my very helpful IT staff HAS A GOOD TIME on regular basis.

[abstractrude]

haha matx. all im saying is it can be done. and going to frys and buying a 60 dollar switch and 20 300 foot ethernet cables is not the answer. fixed my original post haha. also, matx has been on vacation for like a month. so be very careful.