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How can I create a network for a video producing company, what type of equipments should I buy?

HQ175 workers, and there are 7 sub divisions of 176 total divide as such 15 graphic departments 5 marketing dept 5 relation dept 2 financial dept 5 employees in sales and 2 managers each in each retail store. what kind of fast server should i use? 1-what kind of topologies should I create with these dividions located in 7 different cities? 2-what kind of printers, PC's,monitors, softwares do you recommend for this setup? 3-what kind of network protcols should you recommend? 4- what kind of security should you recomend for a LAN?WAN? 5- what recommendation would you suggest for a wide area network i.e ISDN,Frame Relay,T1, DSL, Cable Modem. 6-what kind of backup plan and fault tolerance i.e Raid, Clustering this is a comon network, 7-what type of LAN wiring do you suggest? 8- How many hubs, swithces ,routers do you suggest? 9- what advantage will there to deploy an email server in HQ against an ISP host email account

Public Comments

1. You do not state what you wish to do with your server, so let's put that aside. Each office will have it's own network. You will want to install Cat5E or if you have the budget cat 6 cabling in each office. You need a structured cabling specialist to design the cable plant at each office. If you need IDF's. Put Gigabit ethernet switches in the MDF with wither gigabit or 10 gig (over fiber) fanouts to each IDF. Then you can use 10/100/1000 edge switches in each IDF to feed the structured cablng to the desktop. Connections between the sites...I would use VPN links as opposed to point to point circuits. Thus each location can be provisioned with the most cost effective service available at that location, (T-1, Cable, etc.) Do not forget that services like cable and dsl are asymetric so when sizing sized based on outgoing bandwidth. Each site needs a firewall... Sonic wall has a great product line that consolidates router and security funtionality, is easy to config, and they have good support. Any servers should have at least mirrored drives (Raid1 ) if you have the budget go woth raid 5. I would not host my own email server. Look at using one of the Yahoo or google hosting plans. They are very reasonably priced, have excellent spam filtering and fantastic availability.