Deciding Where Networking Devices Must Go

After your plan is in place, you must purchase the necessary equipment, cables, connectors, and so on and start deploying the components that make a network work. When you start situating key network equipment including servers, hubs, and routers you need to make some important decisions about where to put them.

For small organizations of 25 people or less, using separate locked facilities to store hubs and servers may not make sense. Small organizations tend to be more informal and are less likely to have the kind of budget that supports a full-time information systems (IS) staff. In these circumstances, you usually want to situate your networking gear along with all your other gear out in the open with other equipment for easy access to one and all. If you do put the networking gear out in the open , make sure that only users with valid passwords can log onto such equipment. Otherwise, locking it up is highly recommended.

Larger organizations tend to be more concerned about security and control, and, therefore, they usually situate key networking components in locked equipment rooms and in locked wiring closets or wiring centers at various locations around their offices. Because the equipment has to be close to the wiring, it's not uncommon for servers to reside in wiring closets along with punchdown blocks, hubs, and other networking equipment.

Only authorized personnel should be allowed to access these facilities. Likewise, only authorized personnel should be allowed to add users or equipment to the network, usually within a system of regularly scheduled updates or maintenance. In office buildings , for example, this usually means one or two wiring closets or equipment rooms per floor, where only authorized personnel have keys or access codes to get into these rooms.

Tip 

Choose an approach to situating your servers that makes sense for your organization, and stick with it. If you're going to follow rules for placing equipment, share those rules with employees so that they know what's going on. In fact, formulating a security policy for most networks is a smart move, and you should regularly explain that policy to your employees in detail. (For more information on this subject, see Chapter 18.)

Most small- to medium- sized companies such as the fictitious XYZ Inc. mentioned at this chapter's outset put their servers into small, locked rooms at each end of the floors they occupy in an office building. This keeps the distances between users' desktops and the wiring centers acceptably low, and puts their servers alongside the punchdown blocks and hubs they use, which helps manage wiring. This approach also provides controlled access to the equipment and software that makes their networks work in a small number of closely managed locations. Finally, it addresses the need for adequate ventilation and power control that hubs and servers require for proper operation, which many wiring closets do not offer.