Need help with layout of lab network

Jonas Bjorklund Svensson · August 16, 2019

Hi people!

I'm setting up a new camera and network infrastructure in our lab at work, and have gotten ethernet cameras for that purpose, as being able to access any camera from any computer is very appealing for us. Our data collection comes in bursts, as data acquisition is done on all diagnostics more or less simultaneously once every 10 seconds or so. Peak load is therefore quite high, but average load is quite low.

Anyhow, at the moment, I have just made a very simple setup to be able to use some of the cameras right away, with each camera connected to a computer's built-in network port, and a USB3-ethernet dongle for the University network (and internet) connection to the computers. What I would like to do is put all of the cameras on a network to be accessible from any computer on that network, as well as the computers being able to access our NAS, which also needs to be reachable via the University networks, as we need to be able to get the data from our offices. There are also some other things which I'd like to hook up to this network, e.g. some power supplies I need to control. I hope I have painted a somewhat clear picture here of what it is I'm after.

The problem is that the IT guys will not let us connect the cameras and such to the university network, and we also wouldn't want those cameras to be directly accessible on that network. In fact, I accidentally connected one of the cameras to that network and it stole the IP of something important, and I got a visit from a very angry IT guy, so I want to try not to repeat that too many times. I have tried speaking with some other IT guys as well, but they are really not very helpful at all...

How do you think I should go about configuring this network? Additional PCIe ethernet card (or USB dongle) in each computer and hook them up to both networks at the same time? It seems to me that there should be a more elegant solution to this.

Bonus question(s):

We might also want to get a new NAS, as I don't think the one we have has, or can have, any fast SSD cache, which should be helpful for our bursty data throughput, as far as I know. A regular consumer unit would probably suffice, with at least 6 drive bays. Any suggestions for that? We have a Gbit switch in the lab which is now quite a few years old, is it worth looking for an upgrade? All the cables I'm getting are cat6, S/STP, as we have quite a bit of EM interference in the lab, and the price difference is negligible between cat5/5e/6 from our retailer.

Any tips, suggestions and advice is welcome! Keep in mind that I'm not very experienced with networking stuff

//Jonas