The growing business handbook : inspiration and advice ... - Sparkler

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Build the network
6.1
As you grow from a room to a floor to a site to a chain, Marco van Beek at Forget
About IT discusses how to make sure your IT system keeps up and how you can
avoid finding yourself in network hell
As a business grows, its networking infrastructure must be able to grow with it.
When you first start a business, sharing data with your colleagues is not really a
problem. You might not have any yet, and even if you do, most likely you are all
working from home and e-mailing each other. However, as a business grows, sharing
resources can be a very powerful way of controlling costs, as well as enabling your
staff to have tools that on their own they cannot justify.
When you have a handful of users, a small ADSL or cable wireless router is a
practical way of setting up a network, and most manufacturers will say that they are
suitable for up to 20 or 30 users, but in reality their performance will start to drop
even with half a dozen people on the network. The main reason for this is that a
wireless network doesn’t scale unless you are prepared to spend a lot of money, and
by this I mean that if you get a quote and it is less than a wired network of equivalent
size, you are probably not spending enough.
Although wired networks offer at least a tenfold increase in speed over wireless,
this is not the main reason they are faster. They are faster because each user can have
a dedicated connection, rather than sharing bandwidth on a wireless channel.
Ethernet switches have the ability to prioritize traffic, as well as queuing it in a way
that optimizes the utilization of the heavier loads. However, used incorrectly, they
can degrade the performance just as easily.
Most ADSL or cable routers include a small Ethernet switch, giving you four or
more ports that you can use for a wired network. Wherever possible, you should use
these for devices that do not have screens and will tend to be left on all the time:
printers, network attached storage (NAS) devices, servers etc.
As your business grows, you will fill up those four ports very quickly, so the next
infrastructure purchase should be a proper Ethernet switch. Your choices are
straightforward: managed or unmanaged, rack-mounted or desktop. The difference
between a managed and unmanaged switch is that with a managed switch, you can
configure the behaviour of the device, and it can be used to troubleshoot problems.
The more complicated the network the more likely it will be that you need a managed
switch. If you do not have anyone who understands how to use a managed switch,
there is no point in buying one. Stick with an unmanaged switch until such a time
when your network has grown to make it a requirement. As to the physical shape of
the device, the main reason to buy a rack-mounted device is because you have a rack