Cabling Design

[tohoken]

I have a network admin that wants to cable our entire switch infrastructure in a star topology. IE, each switch in each wiring closet will have 2 uplink cables back to the collapsed core. I feel that this is very expensive and not necessary. I think that each wiring closet should have 2 uplinks back to the collapsed core for redundancy and all switches in the closet uplinked together. Which design is more efficient, correct, and more importantly, cheaper. Thanks in advance.

[peter.mainwaring]

Cabling each switch back to the core is definitely more expensive and I agree with you that it is unnecessary. However, I'm not sure that there is a "correct" way of doing it. It very much depends on the environment and the implications of not linking every switch back to the core (loss of revenue etc.). As long as every switch has an alternate link back to the core, that should give you your redundancy. The alternate link could be via another switch (i.e uplinked together) - that is the way we do it. We even link wiring closets together before they loop back round to the core.

Pete