# Help understanding hardware requirement for rack network



## fred974 (Jan 16, 2019)

Hi all,

We are currently hosting our server in a collocation rack in our local data centre.
We are now in a position to upgrade our hardware to provide an HA environment and as a result are moving to a dedicated quarter rack because if it cheaper than staying on a collocation plan.
The data center is providing us with 1 x Copper 100Mb Cable Drop and 2x8 block IP Addresses.

We will be hosting a Dell PowerEdge C6220 4 nodes server.
Each of the 4 x Nodes are configured as below:
    2 x Intel E5-2650 Xeon Eight-Core 2.0GHz CPUs
    64GB (8x8GB) DDR3 RAM
    6x 600GB SAS 10k 6Gbps Hard Drives installed
    LSI SAS-9210-8i Controller
    Embedded Intel i350 Network Controller (2 x 1Gb Ports, 1 x 100Mb Dedicated Management Port)
    Intel X520 Dual-Port SFP+ 10Gb Mezz Network Card 

To take care of the 1Gb Ports, we have got PowerConnect 5548 Switch.

We also need to buy a 10GBe switch to connect the 10Gb SFP+ port which we haven't got yet..

My question is this:
Do we need a router in the front of our switches and will an L3 switch be enough to get the IP address from the datacenter?
We found this 10gb MikroTik Router Switch that is in our price range and we are wondering if used with SwitchOS as L3 switch if it can  handle the pulling of the IP address that are given to us.
Would you use a firewall in front of the switch?

We have never populated a rack before and in our office lab, we have a classic, ROUTER/FIREWALL/DHCP --> SWITCH --> DEVISES


----------

