May 17, 2003
The Big One Done!
This is what an 800 user LAN looks like:
A long time ago in a land far, far away Pacific Bell had a large building with hundreds of service reps. With a single Telephone Man to care for them. Joe Baca. They were his girls. Technology advanced, leases expired, and Joe's girls moved into new facilities -- with Joe.
The new place holds 700-800 workers. When we moved in we installed the latest and greatest computers -- 286 powered, 2 megs RAM, enclosed floppy drive. The floppy drive loaded the OS and some programs and connected to the LAN. It was a fun LAN to install. The workstations had 15-pin AUI connectors for the LAN, hooked to stiff, thick transceiver cables. Workstations were cabled over to stacks of 8-port hubs in cabinets scattered out on the floor. The stacked hubs connected to fiber hubs in the terminal rooms. We used XNS protocol on the LAN, not TCP/IP.
A few years later we spent many weekends and evenings, when the workers were away, tearing up the floors and running cat-5 UTP cables. We've upgraded the hub equipment to the Cabletron MMAC+ and now to Cisco switches. In the process we have reduced the space requirement in the terminal room to just eight racks, and two of them are nearly empty.
Posted by at May 17, 2003 09:19 AM