Question : Build Small/Medium Office Network

Hi,
I need to set up my office network of 70 computers. It can expand up to 200 computers.
I need to set up 10/100/1000 speed network.
Which switch should i use for networking? The computers are placed on different departments like accounting,programmers etc.
Which router should i use for VPN?

Answer : Build Small/Medium Office Network

Hi There,
I can give you some information from my experience that I built for my company, it is a very similar environment. (About 50 workstations that are now almost 150 with VLAN's etc)

Basically, I went for 3COM (but Cisco, Nortel, HP all will do the same just fine or better) as a solution for pricing reasons, they have good quality switches for medium sized buisnesses.

I have a stack of 5X 48 port  3870 series switches 10/100/1000 (Layer II managed with VLAN support that will soon have a Layer III firmware upgrade according to 3COM). The stack has a nice 10Gbit backbone interconnect and gives me good performance. The stack is modular so you can always add as many switches as you need while expanding.

From the stack of switches I have an aggregated link of Ethernet (2 aggregated 1Gbit all in all 2Gbit nominal) to my Layer III switch: Superstack 3 4200 series.

To the SuperStack 3 4200 I connected my firewall and Internet connectivity as well as the domain server.

As far as VLAN's go- I created several VLAN's on the Layer II 3870 stack, the VLAN's I wanted to share or route I added to them the aggregated ports of my layer III aggregated connection and was able to setup routing.
If you are interested in having an isolated VLAN from the rest of the company (Administration for example) whith just Internet access for example you can simply add an additional uplink from the set of ports in the stack that you defined as "VLAN ADMINISTRATION"  and connect it directly to the Layer III switch with the proper routing just for Internet.

The switches offer all the basic essentiales needed, security (MAC address based) per physical port, QoS, priorities to certain ports, broadcast limit etc.

That is the classic network topology you are probably looking at.

Just to make it clear- Layer III switch is essentially your router for this case.

Cheers,
-David