Urgent Help with Fiber Optic/Ethernet CCTV LAN

[Mastran]

Hello, this is my first post in this amazing forum (i didn´t find the "Newbies say Hi" section), and as usual, i come with questions i hope somebody can answer.

So after being unemployed for 2 years, i´ve landed a miracle job doing Cabling and LAN deployment in a Small Company, basically they are trying to expand to the market of Network Deployments so they needed a "computer guy", wich, you guessed it, turned out to be me.

My very first job, it turns out, is gonna be a big CCTV deployment of a LAN consisting of 20 IP cameras PoE class3. This cameras are going to be installed in different buildings, 2 per building, wich will be connected to a PoE Switch with SFP ports, the backbone of the LAN is a Huge Fiber Optic "ring" that is already there (tough not in use yet). And that will be used to....¿interconnect the Switches?

The Fiber is Multimode 50/125 type Fiber that ends in a Patchcord LC-LC Distribution Box, and the company that hired us is gonna give us 2 threads of the Fiber to work with and deploy the LAN.

When i found out that this was gonna be my very first job, i freaked out !! I was very stressed for a lot of weeks, coupling it with trying to fit in in my New Office and trying to fulfill the desires of the Company (i really need the job, and most importantly i think is a perfect oportunity to learn, otherwise, i don´t see a posibility for a job of this type handling this type of equipment in my near future)

With some self, education, YT videos, and lot of Googling, i´ve been calming down, understanding some concepts and on...so relieving some stress there. This is a huge stretch for me professionaly, i´ve done other jobs before but only with UTP/Ethernet types of medium, never though i had to deal with Fiber; so lately i´ve been learning about Transceivers, miniGBIC, SFP ports, etc. All types of concepts totally new for me.

Heck, i don´t even know how to handle a Managed Switch.

After drawing a Diagram, the questions have begining to rise up once more:

That´s a very rough diagram that i draw, the lines in BLACK are the Fiber Optic cabling, the RED ones are the UTP/STP CAT5 cable that is already wired and tested and go from the Switch to the cameras.

The PoE section of the theory i´ve got it, is in the LAN segmenting and design i´m having troubles with.

As you can see there´s a "Master" Switch with 4 SFP ports that "closes" the Fiber "Ring" and is directly connected with UTP to the Server PC with Ethernet, the rest of the Switches have 2 SFP.

My main questions are:

1) How do i connect the Switches one to another so the NVR software picks up every camera?? Is escalating Switches needed? in this case...what is "escalating" Switches??

2) Do the Switches need to be Layer 2 or 3 ? Is it strictly necessary for the Swithes to have an IP address?

3) Are miniGBIC 1000BASESX SFP Modules enough? We are using LC-LC patchcords

4) Do this miniGBIC modules have to be from the same Brand/Manufacturer of the Switches to secure compatibility

5) How many miniGBIC modules do i need for this LAN (AKA transceivers) ? Can one SFP send AND receive, or are 2 SFP /thus 2 miniGBIC modules/ necessary fot that?

6) Is GIGABIT an ideal Bandwidth for this LAN? Or de we need 10GIGABIT?

And last but not least....

7) Am i gonna lose my job???

Thanks in advance...hope i´ll be the one answering newbies questions soon..

 

[cobra_shipwreck]

The fiber connections are for back bone links or backhaul. As far as QOS is concerned you would need to create a separate addressing scheme for the cameras and give them higher priority over other network devices on the switches. Now at the router the question boils down to one of are you going straight out to the internet at each location, or do you have point to point links to the other facilities with the internet connectivity occurring at one central switching location at your corporate central office facility.

50 micron fiber has replaced 62 micron fiber and 50/125 is the new standard commercially. Capable of 10GB interlinks it is sufficient for current enterprise demands, but higher computing and network connectivity requirements in cloud based data centers has made things show that even that speed is insufficient for todays growing demand for internet connectivity and speed.

Longer term you will be revisiting these links and replacing them with faster fiber interconnects in the future at some point. Now the real question is will your employer provide all needed tools or will you have to? If you have to you would need to insist on prefabricated fiber optic cables, unless you want to dump 20 grand on a good commercial splicing kit. 3 grand will get you a base model set but also bear in mind that these kits are part hungry and the parts will eat you alive cost wise.

I would also conclude in stating that the specifications for LTE5 next generation cell phone towers supports 20GB/ps down to the device and requires a tower every 1500 feet or so. That requirement will really push the back bone and technology connections to their limits and could make fiber optic connection to the home the norm and not the unusual oddity except for those in the rich new neighborhoods.

 

[System Error Message]

7) yes after you finish the job since they wont need you anymore.

As with any kind of cabling theres always the quality of cables (like CAT). It mainly depends on how much data is expected to go through, distance and conditions. I can tell you that i dont have any qualifications for this but it is easy to figure out. To find out how much bandwidth you need from one switch to another take into account the image quality of the cameras. Do the cameras do encoding or send raw video? 720p uses 2Mb/s, 4Mb/s on higher quality. 1080P can use up to 12Mb/s and this is for encoded streams. For raw streams you will have to calculate the resolution (in pixels) * framerate * bits per pixel. Than theres the question if the switches are also used for other things and take that into account and perhaps future things.

10Gb/s fibre optics can be expensive especially with POE switches so it really depends on the budget and requirements.

Wireless technology may boast of high speeds but there are hidden problems. A cell phone tower shares that 20Gb/s (make sure to check if its bits or bytes) but it may be total bandwidth so that has to be shared across all users/traffic. Its the same that current LTE4 supports high speeds but if you live in a city no ISP is going to give you great speeds compared to what you get from wire. However point to point wireless is an option to avoid drilling with cables and could be a contender as the price of fibre optics with the modules can be very expensive. Just remember that the practical bandwidth you can expect is about half of rated connection from the overheads and single direction.

A layer 3 switch does routing so if you had 2 different subnets a layer 3 switch can route between them instead of going through the router.

It depends on the NVR, the NVR will pick up cameras based on a set of rules which depends on what NVR you have. Some must be configured, some will use layer 2 multicast and so on. Make sure you have layer 2 and 3 isolation for this setup for security reasons that means using both vlans and IP(or custom) for the network to prevent someone from just hijacking.

So if the cameras are only 100Mb/s or gigabit than your LAN can be gigabit but your interconnect must be 10Gb/s. If however you use 10Gb/s LAN than the only affordable way for a non bottlenecked interconnect is to trunk multiple 10Gb/s ports.

 

[cobra_shipwreck]

I would also note that you need to learn everything you can on this job. The more you learn and are capable of doing after this job, the more you can sell your skills

 

[System Error Message]

When it comes to module compatibility you can have different brands at different ends as long as they use the same medium and protocol. Switches however can have different compatibility with modules.

 

[Mastran]

Thanks so much for the replies, i think i´m on the right track. I´´ll let you know how everything moves forward !!

 

[cobra_shipwreck]

I would also advise sticking with one end to end vendor for everything. Hardware conflicts are an eventuality and it is much easier to work with one company that you bought all your products from so that there is no finger pointed but at them and they can only point at their product and point you where the install is incorrect.