[BBLISA] Suggestions for temporary point to point link?

[John Stoffel]

Marc>  We are moving our company about 550 meters to the left(facing
Marc>  the front of the building), and plan on moving our data center
Marc>  in a staggered fashion over the course of many weeks.

This is what I'd argue against if I could.  Just do it all over one
weekend.  But it's not clear how much downtime you can afford.  And
would the downtime of one night cost more than the high speed
temporary link you need?

Marc>  We would like to set up a point to point link between the sites
Marc>  so we can span our vlans across both sites to ease the pain of
Marc>  moving way to many machines.

Sure, sounds like a great idea.  

Marc>  We haven't been able to find anybody to lease us a line for
Marc>  three months for a reasonable price, and are looking at
Marc>  alternatives

What do you define as reasonable?  The big cost for these things isn't
the day to day, it's the time and effort to setup equipment and pull
fibre to make it all work.  

Marc>  RF looks like it might be a possibility. Does anybody have any
Marc>  advice/pointers/experience with any of this type of gear?

Do you have any buildings in the way?  You might be able to get away
with some WiFi 802.11g links with highly directional attennas.  The
key might be to get some kind soul to provide a relay link since you
don't have line of site.  

Marc>      The distance is less than 550 meters
Marc>      We need at least a 100Mb link 

This is going to be tough, it's just a hard number to hit.  

Marc>      We do not have line of sight we don't need the link for
Marc>      longer than 3 months

If you move all the servers in one weekend, you won't need the link.
:]

With a couple of routers on each end, multiple wifi
transmitters/receivers, some trunking/vlan software, antennas and a
nice person in the middle, you might be able to go wireless.  

Not going to be cheap though.  


Hmmm... thinking about it more, how close to line of site are you?  Do
you have access to the roof on each building?  You might be able to
put your RF antennas up high and get enough line of site to be able to
transmit at least some signal across the gap.  

That small 1' triangular truss, with some cable stays might do the
trick to let you see each site clearly.  Or some intermediate point
between.

John