This is the first time I am working with a low voltage company to do some underground cable runs.
Sorry for my horrible drawings but as you can see I need to run redundant cables from the IDF to 3 different buildings. The vendor wants to run from IDF to the first building then daisy chain to the other switches and back to the IDF and use STP as the failover. This makes sense to me but I’ve always been taught to avoid daisy chaining switches.
The 2nd pic is how I’m imaging the setup. Am I too old school? What would you do? Also, I am getting quoted for copper or fiber. The IDF is actually connecting to 5 total buildings, not 3 as pictured. The building furthest away from the IDF is about 320ft.
Our company policy is to only do home runs unless prohibitively expensive. If we have to daisy chain, we do it by using extra runs (or a fiber bundle with sufficient fiber pairs) and patching one to the other at the intermediate location so that the connection is only daisy chained from a physical perspective and not from a switch connection perspective. If the run is too long for that (unsure whether you’re talking about copper or fiber cabling here) then you can use an ethernet range extender like the Mikrotik GPeR or Ubiquiti UACC-LRE - these are PoE powered devices that regenerate the ethernet signal the way a switch would.
Doing daisy chaining can have a valid reason, like saving tons of ports on, let’s say, a cruise ship, where we speak of thousand 8-port switches. Been there, done there (not personally, but my colleagues). We had like 5 switches in a daisy chain connecting 10 cabins. Larger ships have like >2600 PAX cabins, every 8-port switch feeds 2 cabins, so like 1300 8-port switches just for the passengers. And then you have a lot of crew cabins as well. Connecting like 2000 switches each with 2 legs to the IDF will increase your IDF port count significantly.
But in your case I don’t see any reason for daisy chaining. I’m with @pjsayers.anotherit here: run more cables as needed, do LAG, but I would recommend MCLAG (multi chassis LAG).
Ask the vendor/cable company why they’ve chosen this daisy chain idea. Maybe they have a valid reason you don’t know.
What you also can do (if budget allows): do MCLAG to IDF and prepare daisy chains between the buildings. Just in case an extraordinary gigantic mole bites your cables to IDF, you would be able to daisy chain if necessary.
In a plant type area where there aren’t many users in each building I’d go plan 1 (Assuming this isn’t handling PLC comms). If each building represents many people I’d go plan 2.
