Ourworx – Multi Tenant Offices

Network Design and Configuration.

Company

Ourworx is a beautiful multi-tenant office building located in Stockport, Manchester. At Ourworx all your facilities are provided and taken care for you, such as free tea and coffee, Internet and Wifi, Office Cleaning. They have over 20 offices for 1-4 person(s) across 2 floors, aswell as communal areas for public meetings, and a private meeting room that is available to all tenants allowing upto 10 persons to attend.

Challenge

When Ourworx came to us, they said that despite them having 2 internet connections, they still had poor internet connectivity, when diving deeper into it, what had actually happened was that they were not protected from any kind of power surge and they had recieved one that had blown one of their modems and was causing issues with the router/firewall. Our challenge was to replace this equipment, and also upgrade and secure the network so that each office was seperated from each other and so that each office couldn’t effect one another.

Solution

When it came to replacing the Modem and Router this was a relatively simple and straight forward task, a Mikrotik routerboard was brought in to replace all of the previous equipment. This allowed us to have both Internet connections under the one unit and increase failover redundancy. When configuring the new Mikrotik unit we also setup the Virtual LANs for each office and reconfigured the 4 Netgear switches to pass through the VLAN’s. Each office had atleast 1 wall panel each with 2 ethernet ports, so a rewire of the switches was also done to allow 1 POE (power over ethernet) and 1 non-POE port to each panel allow each office to have the ability to use POE with their office phones.

Wifi was done a little differently, This was setup to have isolation for each device, to prevent any unauthorised person from gaining access to something they shouldn’t.

As part of the configuration, we virtually split each floor accross the 2 gateways to lower the over all usage of either Internet connection, as well as this, we added QOS so that not one office can use all of the available bandwith whilst the next door neighbor is struggling with their Skype meeting. Lastly we added line redundancy, so if one internet line does go, it backs over on to the other one.

Results

With the new network setup and configuration in place, Ourworx management has stopped reciving complaints of loss of internet. this has also increased the security for each tenant so that they can feel confident about having NAS drives and network printers in their office. Guests can feel secure on the wifi knowing that no one can snoop in on what they are doing whilst they are there.

Over all this has produced a very stable, very secure and productive network environment for the Staff and Visitors at Ourworx.