Cable Plant, Switches, Racks, & Cloud

IT Solutions that Work^SM

Overview

At the core of your IT infrastructure sits your cable plant and core switches. These are typically housed in a computer or "equipment" room of varying sizes. The equipment room has racks to mount the server(s) as well the peripheral equipment and related cable management.

L4 Networks provides the complete suite of components, installations and services for your core IT infrastructure. By "core" we mean cable plant, servers, switches, racks, storage, backup, environmental planning and equipment (power, HVAC), and related peripherals. We have done it before and are happy to do it again. On this page we will highlight the cable plant, switches, racks, and some peripherals.

Cable Plant

Infrastructure wiring needs to be well thought out in advance before the first wire is pulled. An L4 Networks engineer will site survey your premises and work with you to develop a definitive set of requirements for placement of client devices (workstations, printers, scanners, etc.), wireless radios/access points, servers, phones, patch panels, and other items. Once this is completed we will develop a cabling plan based on your floor plan in an Autocad or Visio format that can be given to a cabling company to bid. We can also manage the process turn-key and select and manage a cable installer to do the installation.

Core and Edge Switches

LAN ethernet switches are nearly a commodity product these days. Despite this, we see many companies installing residential grade unmanaged switch equipment in their business environments. The result usually is not pretty as serious performance issues and even lockups often occur. We prefer to use managed ethernet switches from trusted brands Extreme Networks, Juniper, HP, SMC and for SOHOs - Netgear.

Equipment Racks & Cabinets & Placement

L4 Networks provides and installs equipment and server racks from Great Lakes, ICC, Newton and others.

Equipment Room Planning

Most IT equipment systems operate in what is termed "a standard office environment". This does not mean that you can cram 10 servers, monitors, switches, routers, etc. into a small wiring closet and not have an overheating and/or a power problem. Certainly not! A carefully planned equipment room or closet, however, can be both efficient in operation and not break the budget. In designing such rooms, we consider power demands and emergency power options, HVAC calculations, structured cabling needs, equipment racks, proper equipment placements for efficient cooling, KVMs (keyboard, video, monitor) switches, and other factors.

We have designed, built and retrofitted numerous rooms of various sizes and can assist you in a new design or revamping a current one.

Cloud Computing Solutions

Cloud computing is one of the most misunderstood buzzwords around at the moment. In essence, cloud computing is nothing more than using centrally located and managed resources. There are several types of clouds - private, public, and hybrid. An example of a private cloud is a Microsoft Terminal Server or Citrix based server that hosts an organization's applications, desktops, databases. etc. and is located in a facility owned the same organization. Client users utilize the organization's network infrastructure to access the services hosted on this private cloud. An example of the public cloud would the same as our private cloud, but it would be hosted buy a third party vendor at that vendor's data center. A hybrid simply combines the two services.

L4 Networks started building private clouds for our customers in 2004 before the term became popular and has completed many since then. We like the private cloud model as from the user perspective they still get the look and feel of their desktops, yet from a management standpoint, the work is greatly simplified and more reliable as it is centrally administered. Our customers really appreciate the cost aspects as maintenance fees go down the more one moves away from touching the desktop machine. In fact, in several customers, we have driven the desktop maintenance costs nearly to zero by using smart client devices from Wyse that do not have any moving parts, and are impossible to infect or corrupt.

Which is good for you? The question often comes down to security and reliability. If you are in the medical profession, we would have serious concerns about the legal ramifications of putting sensitive patient data in a public cloud service. In many respects, the same can be said for a non medical business. In a private cloud, if your internet connection is down, you can still work. When using a public cloud, an internet fault stops you cold.

In the public cloud, you give up control of the quality and rely on the assertions of the third party hosting vendor. There have been several major multi-day outages at such vendors in the past year alone. Can you really afford to stop seeing patients or stopping your business for that long a period?

Learn More

Other core solutions we provide include:

Load balancers
Bandwidth management
Cloud security
Terminal Services
Smart "NO-PC" Devices

We just don't talk about IT, we get IT done.^SM