On Fri, 6 Apr 2001 09:19:34
 rizal sharif wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>My company currently is in the process of selecting
>one vendor to lay LAN cabling infrastructure i.e Fiber
>optic + UTP cable.
>Since we don't have any experiance in this area, we
>asked for open proposal and different vendors came out
>with different brand for Fiber optic, UTP and switch.
>
>The combinations proposed to us were:
>
>1)Lucent fiber optic & UTP cable + 3 Com SS III
>(10/100 base )switch.
>
>2)Mod-Tap fiber optic & UTP cable + Cisco 10/100 base
>switch.
>
>3) Lucent fiber optic & Elite UTP cable + Baystak
>10/100 base switch.
>
>In term of price, Cisco is the most expensive one
>followed by Baystak and 3 Com.
>
>The no. of workstation in the LAN will be 52 and it
>will be used to run an ERP applications (IFS or JDE)
>that reside in the HP L2000 server. We will use Oracle
>8i as the database.All the workstations will have
>10/100 NIC.
>
>My questions is, do you think we need the high end
>switch like Cisco/Baystak. Or 3 Com SS III switch is
>adequate since it still the same 10/100 Mbps.
>
>And can please you tell me your experiance on these
>products.

My 2 cents worth:

We just recently overhauled our network as well.  I can't tell you the name of the actual fiber, but I can list some of what we have and why:
- Ran a 12-strand fiber to each closet location (3 locations).
- Cisco 3508 fiber switch (main connection from each closet)
- Cisco 3548 (48-port) switch
- Cisco 3524 (24-port) switch
- From each closet ran CAT 5e cabling (we ran Beldin, but Lucent is just as good and about the same price) to each workstation location, 3 pull's each (3 cat 5e cables) so that we had some future expandiblity.
- The data connectors are Krone 5e RJ-45, both in the closet and at the workstation location.

This will give us some good bandwidth for some time to come.  I personally would probably lean towards your 2nd choice.

We also had bids that included 3COM & Baystack, but opted for Cisco.  3COM is going some changes and at one point had announced that they were looking and selling off a part of themselves (I believe the networking portion, but I don't remember).  Some comparison reports that I had come across showed that Baystack wasn't very reliable long term.  That left Cisco, which we were considering anyway simply because of their reliablity and quality product.

That's one of them things where "you get what you pay for." The better the product, the longer it'll last.  Of course, those budgets usually make the final decision!

Hope this helps!
Lance Kephart


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