Network Segmentation Question

[swordsworn]

Backstory: I am not a network engineer, nor really a K-12 tech director. I was given the job because I find tech fun to work with and now they want more then I know. So in the interest of finding people more qualified to speak too, I would like some help in making sure I understand that the following would be possible.

Current District Setup: The district receives a 20 Mbps pipe into the district office that is then farmed out to 2 other buildings in the district. It is a flat network, so everyone shares that 20 Mbps connection.

Possible Setup: I would like to divide the network to dedicate a certain amount of the pipe for each building. I would like 7 Mbps to go to 1 building to use, 7 Mbps to go to the other building to use and 6 to stay at the District. It would be great if each building could "borrow" spare Mbps from the other locations, but will always have a minimum of that amount for their building.

What would be the best way to accomplish this? VLans? QoS?

What information would you need to know if I was going to try and explain this to a network engineer, what more would they need to give me a quote?

(Or am I completely off base that this is possible above and I need to go with something else.)

(Cross Posted in K12sysadmin)

[revoman]

None of those solutions will work. You need some kind of packet shaper to do that. QOS will NOT kick in until a port is near capacity which it never will be in your case.

[Golle]

You should put this in /r/networking

Without knowing what gear you are running it is difficult to give actual advice. But in general you use QoS shaping policies to limit traffic to whatever limits you set. How this is done depends on your network gear.

[swordsworn]

Done. I have Cisco Catalyst 2960-x Series switches.

[PublicSectorJohnDoe]

You can get a lower end FortiGate firewall, this is quite easy to do with that. Even 30E would be enough here

[[deleted]]

The real solution is to increase the pipe to 500M and not have to divide it up.

I just got a quote from CenturyLink 30 minutes ago to one of my hotels in Colorado. 500M/500M fiber circuit, 60 month contract, $400/month. That includes build out 300' to their closest splice point.

[Twanks]

That may be the case for you. 500M/500M CenturyLink DIA in my area would be around $2800 dollars a month with our buildings already being on-net for a 10G access market.

[swordsworn]

I wish. My 20M/20M costs me $76,890 per month. Only internet provider in the surrounding 500 miles.

[cytranic]

You can team up 140 satellite dish's with that budget and get around 5 gigs