[c-nsp] Equipment for a large-ish LAN event

[Laurent Dumont]

Hi gents,

Thanks for all the comments, we really appreciate the input. I'll try to 
answer a few of the questions.

  * QOS is something we looked into but were were in a particular
    situation. We have plenty of bandwidth (at least, we had...) for
    game and generic internet traffic. That said, since we are scaling
    up in terms of players, it might end up being something we work on
    this year in order to guarantee a stable experience.
  * Game traffic should be a very small part of our BW. What is probably
    more problematic are game downloads (Steam, Origin etc.), Winows
    updates and Torrents. I really want to find the time for a proper
    Netflow setup so that I can have really accurate data on
    protocol/port breakdown.
  * We never had any incidents with players DDOS-ing other participants
    but we do have monitoring in place in order to prevent any abuse.
    Players, sometime with good reason, are quite serious about anything
    regarding lag and latency.
  * Because of distance between the tables and our core, the event room
    physical layout, we can't directly go from our access into our core.
    It would simplify our design a lot, that is very true. That said, I
    would try to run at least two cables from my access to my core.
  * If cost is not too prohibitive, we will use armored fiber.
  * DHCP Snooping, BPDU for STP and IPV6 are all on our list!

As previously stated, I want to thank all of your for your insight.

Laurent




On 12/9/2015 4:15 AM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
>> On Dec 8, 2015, at 5:19 PM, Laurent Dumont<ldumont at coldnorthadmin.com>  wrote:
>> * We are planning for slightly over 2000 seats(players).
> Okay.  I think right now you’re making this more complicated than you need to.
>
> If you need 2000x 1G access ports, the easiest way to aggregate that up would be to use a single 10G uplink from each access switch.  48x access switches with 48x 1G ports each, aggregating into a single core switch with 48x 10G ports.  That gives you 2304x 1G access ports.
>
> The access switches should be 2960X-48TD-L, the core can be any of a bunch of different possible ones…  We use a lot of N9K-C9396PX which are nice because they also give you 12x 40G ports, which are good for servers.  List price on all of the above comes to just a hair over $300k.
>
> If you really want to have routing in your core, you’re looking at an ASR-9006 with a pair of A9K-36X10GE-SE cards, which would set you back another $1.1M at list price.
>
> In addition to all that, you’ll need optics.  If the distance limit works for you, a whole lot of SFP-H10GB-ACU10M will be less finicky than fiber.  If you go with third-party, you can get up to 20M instead of the 10M max distance that Cisco resell.
>
>                                  -Bill
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