LAN / Office Design

[GRANT3779]

Hi All,

Not exactly sure on the best place to put this but hopefully a few of you have some advice/experience to share on my query.

Basically going to be doing a rip / replace as moving to a new office. Will be reusing a few of the 3850 switches we have, but buying more also.

Office is one floor with around 350 users in total. There is the one comms room where all the networking kit will be located and some servers/UCS

Should I be following the Cisco hierarchical model of Access / Distro / Core or look at a collapsed backbone? With this being a blank canvas would like to make it as scalable and future proof as possible. 

The initial thought was to have a stack of 3850s running IPBASE as the Access Layer, and further smaller stack of 3850s with IPSERVICES running as a collapsed Core / Backbone. I've plenty experience in administering networks that are already in place, but just started on the Design side of my studies and would welcome any advice / expertise.
If I went for the above, would I have the L3 switching on the Access Stack, and a default route the up to the Core/Dsitro for getting out to the WAN?
Any pointers / thoughts welcome ;-)

Thanks

[Seb Rupik]

Hi there,

The 3850 would be a good choice for your access layer. Since you are looking at a L2 access layer you may want to consider 2960's; less features, smaller number of stack members, but much cheaper.

Given the comparitely small user base I wouldn't entertain the idea of a L3 edge, purely on the grounds of licensing costs. You would not see enough L2 traffic on your core switches to warrant moving the MAC addresses out to the edge.

Plus with the money saved by going 2960/L2 edge, you could get a fancy 4500X core switch :)

cheers,

Seb.

[GRANT3779]

Hi Seb,

Only reason I was going with the 3850s was that I already have 2 running IPSERVICES and a 4 others with IPBASE. So it's just a case of I already have them "use" them :-)

Only other main part of the design is an MPLS WAN Connection out and will be an Internet breakout. Not sure if it's even worth separating the data into seperate VLANs with the numbers involved as everyone is pretty much the same department.

I'm thinking L2 Access with the 3850s stack and a small stack of 3850 IPSERVICES (2) as a Core/Distro, have my WAN connections ASA etc.. in there.