A global cruise line company needs to refresh its current fleet. They will refresh the "insides" of the ship to be cost-effective and increase their sustainability. They will replace the complete WLAN/LAN hardware of the ship. In this refresh, the company will not refresh its current security requirements. The CIO also wants to limit the number of unused ports in the switches. Future expansion will always mean a refresh of hardware. They start with the smallest ship with a maximum of 800 guests.
Each ship has a LAN infrastructure consisting of two core switches, up to 10 redundant distribution switches, and up to 500 access switches (400 cabins, 100 technical rooms). The core switches are located in the MDF of the ship and the distribution switches are located in the IDFs of the ship. Each cabin and technical room gets one single access switch.
The cabling structure of the ship will not be refreshed. Each IDF is connected to the MDF by SMF, of which two pairs are available for the interconnect between the core and distribution. The length of SM fiber between MDF and IDF is less than 300 meters (930 ft) and the type used is OS1. Each cabin is connected by a single OM2 pair to the IDF, the maximum length is 60 meters (200 ft). Each technical room is connected by a single OM2 pair to the IDF, with lengths between 100 and 150 meters (320 and 500 ft).
For each cabin/technical room the customer is looking to replace their current fan-less 2530/2540 without changing the requirements, except they need to upgrade the uplink to distribution switch to 10 GbE to handle the increased network traffic, and the technical rooms need redundant power.
The WLAN infrastructure will be 1:1 refreshed without new cabling or new AP locations. Their WLAN infrastructure is based on the 200/300 series indoor and outdoor APs running InstantOS (less than 300 APs). The customer has no change in WLAN requirements.
The cruise line company will replace its current Internet connection before the LAN/WLAN refresh. The new Internet connection will provide a 99.8% uptime, which is needed to ensure the paid guest Wi-Fi is always operational. With this new internet connection, the CIO of the cruise line wants to base the design on the ESP architecture from Aruba because Internet connection is guaranteed.
Based on best practices, what should you recommend as the most cost-effective switch model for the cabins?
