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CradletoGrave is a medium-size insurance company with about 1,000 employees. The company has outgrown its current digs and will soon occupy four separate buildings in an office complex, in addition to maintaining its current satellite location.

The company has decided to build a new network before occupying these buildings and has compiled these facts to help in planning:

• One building will contain the data center and 75 employees. The other three buildings will house about 300 employees each.

• Each building will have two subnets, and the data center will have three of its own subnets.

• The buildings will be linked by single- and multimode fiber.

• The company's satellite office will house about 50 employees, is 80 miles away from the main site and is linked by a T3 connection.

CradletoGrave, C2G to its friends, is thinking growth. It wants to replace its core switch/router as well as the wiring closet switches, and it sees a VoIP (voice over IP) network in its future, so it must ensure that the upgrade can handle VoIP. For example, it wants to have an infrastructure in place that will support QoS (Quality of Service) at Layer 2 and Layer 3, and will allow the company to power the phones from the wiring closets via Power over Ethernet. C2G wants to build a vendor-neutral network. The insurer is considering deploying a wireless LAN, which would also benefit from Power over Ethernet.

In addition, the company is looking for 802.1x support in its switches, not just for possible authentication of access points but for employees who use their laptops in conference rooms. C2G also wants to be in a position to support video via multicast streaming. And it is very interested in high-availability features because ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications and the future VoIP system will require that the network be up and running 24x7. The company's data center needs to be connected to the network. The 12 servers there run ERP and file-sharing applications, and may run video and voice applications in the future. And the company wants room to add 12 more servers to its data center.

C2G wants a Gigabit Ethernet connection to each building as well as two 10 Gigabit ports on the backbone switch/router to be prepared for possible growth in one of the external buildings.

RFI Specs

General Specifications and Instructions:

• IP protocol
• Multicast support on all equipment
• VLAN support
• Layer 2 and Layer 3 QoS
• 802.1x authentication on wiring-closet switches
• Redundant/high-availability solution
• Redundant connections to buildings
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet support at core

Main Building Configuration

Data-center servers: 12
Data-center desktops: 7
Data-center T3 connections: 1
Wiring closets:

• No. 1: 20 desktops, 50 meters from data center
• No. 2: 35 desktops, 75 meters from data center
• No. 3: 15 desktops, 90 meters from data center

Four pair each of single-mode and multimode fiber to each external building

All buildings are less than 500 meters from the main building