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Forum Discussion
Reason to upgrade??
Hey guys, I work for a very small company that is about to make a move to another suite in our current office building. We have a company coming in to get everything wired up in the new office in a couple of weeks, (entire phone system, network connections, etc.). My boss just asked me if there was any need to upgrade any of our network equipment. My immediate answer was, "why? it all still works". He wants me to check into it regardless. He's not itching to make changes, but figures if there is some unknown reason to upgrade, now would be the time. We currently only have three work stations, a standard Xerox copy machine, and a wide format Xerox copier/scanner that is used for all of our drawings and such. All of this is connected to the Network. The current equipment being used is a Netgear "Dual Speed Hub - DS-108" and a Netgear "Prosafe VPN Firewall - FVS-318". We've been using this setup for several years with no issues and are currently not having any issues at all. Everything is hard wired and we are not planning to go wireless. The question is this: Is there any reason or benefit at all to upgrade to newer equipment?
Thanks for any help or advice with this.
Chris
Thanks for any help or advice with this.
Chris
3 Replies
- It sounds like you see no urgent need to upgrade your equipment, but if you are planning to stay in the new suite for the long term you might consider your wiring.
- At some point in the future you should consider migrating to a gigabit network. This would get you faster speeds in transferring data between the workstations.
- There is also a trend towards VOIP (voice over IP) phones that are connected to your internet.
In order to future-proof your wiring, I would have cat6 cable installed for the network up front, preferably with 2 ethernet jacks in each office/work area (allowing for phone and workstation). It's easy to replace your hub and router (and either can be upgraded at any time). But updating the wiring later on would be more disruptive.
BTW, how do you manage backups today? Even a small office needs some form of backup/recovery plan. If you want to address this, you would want to migrate to gigabit ethernet sooner, since network backup takes quite a bit of time over 100 megabit ethernet. A ReadyNAS file server would be a reasonable investment, along with backup software for the workstations. - Thanks for the reply Stephen. I think we'll keep the current equipment for the time being. I will pass along the wiring upgrades as that does make sense. As far as the back up....one work station as secondary hard drive that all projects are backed up on continually. we then have an external hard drive that is kept off-site that we bring up to the office on each Friday and copy the back up drive to it. Just takes a minutes to copy things over and let is run for awhile. Might not be the best setup but it works for us. Thanks again.
Chris
Yes, the wiring was the main thing, it enables the rest (when and if). Not sure where you are putting the router + hub and phone system, but ideally they would be in a space that can be physically secured and is well ventilated. That would allow you to put a server of some sort in the same equipment area (again in the future).Surveyor wrote: Thanks for the reply Stephen. I think we'll keep the current equipment for the time being. I will pass along the wiring upgrades as that does make sense. As far as the back up....one work station as secondary hard drive that all projects are backed up on continually. we then have an external hard drive that is kept off-site that we bring up to the office on each Friday and copy the back up drive to it. Just takes a minutes to copy things over and let is run for awhile. Might not be the best setup but it works for us. Thanks again.
Chris
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