Network Tour

We started the tour on the 3rd floor, which has 2 equipment closets, major wiring there. You definately want a drop ceiling when running network cable. Cables come from the nodes to the patch panels in the equipment room. Labeling is important in the equipment room. The switches actually get you onto the network. The switches are smart switches which are Vlanned off logically. Some switches in the room were cisco 3548 and 3750 (PoE Power over Ethernet) which are 10/100 switches. There were also some FO switches connecting to multi-mode fiber cables running at a Gb instead of Mb.
Video, voip and wireless access points are running thru this room as well as PoE for the same. The switches have to be PoE capable. PoE uses the wires that are not used for transmit/receive. Access layer switches are in this room and distribution layer switches are in the mix. Core switches 4006 are in use and 3510 is in the wings waiting to be installed. 3524PoE's are also used on the network. As well as switches and routers you also have battery backups to keep things running in case of an emergency. We also toured the grounds while walking over to Ken's office and saw where the cables were coming in from the road.
Unfortunately, in the IT department itself it was impossible to tape the tour because of the noise so I didn't get any notes from that section of the tour and it was almost impossible to hear Ken. But here are some pictures from the 1st and 3rd floor Wayne West building and the IT Maintenance department. one of the photos is of the layout of the new vlan Ken was going to implement. Helps to work it out on paper or dry erase board.