UC560 with Small Business Switches?

[chrisrankin79]

Hey yall,

I have recently been tasked with upgrading our current 540 with a 560. We have a 35 person call center that is growing rapidly. My budget from Managment is CRAZY low and I was wondering what anyone thought of the following configuration below:

2 Cat5e cables per cubicle one PC one PHONE.

2 SG500X-48P switches stacked by fiber.

1 UC560

1 Server with SBS 2011 Standard.

Keep in mind I tried the whole "I need access layer switches and a distribution layer switch" approach and they didn't go for it at all. I even tried for Cat6 cabling as well. Any help on this would be great, we are moving into a 10,000 sq. ft. facility and THIS is the approach they want from me. Frustrating.

[jonatrod]

Good morning

Hi Chris, thanks for using our forum, my name is Johnnatan and I am part of the Small business Support community. I was wondering if could I ask you a couple of questions in order to help you.

Could you be a little more explicit, describe what do you want to configure in your topology?

Are you going to configure vlans? Do you need intervlan routing?

Are you going to configure VPN´s?

If could you provide us a picture of your topology, it would be very useful for us.

*Please mark the question as Answered or rate it so other users can benefit from it"

Greetings,

Johnnatan Rodriguez Miranda.

Cisco Network Support Engineer.

[danplacek]

A few notes:

1. A single drop to each desk may save you some money that you can use elseware... if you need gigabit, the newly released SPA514's are quite affordable.

2. Cat5e is fine -- Cat6 isa  waste of money; gigabit works great over c5e.

3. For the stacking -- are those switches in the same rack? If so, look at the 10gbit copper stacking adapter... they are MUCH cheaper than the fiber sfp's (but have something like a 3 meter distance limit).

4. I think you will find that a SG300-08 are *really* affordable and make an excellent core/distribution switch. (They have L3 routing, ACL's, etc...)

5. Going for gigabit POE switches is only worth it if you want to go with gigabit phones... which is only worth it if you are sharing a cable with the PC. The SG500X's are much more expensive than SF300-24P's... I think you will find that if you are doing separate cabling that SF300-24P's + SG200-50's (for data drops) will make more sense.