I'm a sysadmin/developer that works for a small IT company. We are having a new office building built, and we have a limited time window in which to put in the core infrastructure network cabling that we require.
As budgets are tight at the moment, my intention is to get runs of fibre optic cabling from the central server room location to a number of key areas in the building. We aren't interested in getting the cables terminated at this point, we just want to put the runs of cable in place whilst we can.
There will be about 9 runs of fibre in total from the server room (lengths ranging from about 15m to 60m), and I'm probably looking at about 12 or 16 cores in each run - I'll probably only ever use a single pair, but I might as well make it as future/failure proof as reasonably possible, and this number of cores seems to be the sweet spot from a price perspective.
All the cable is going to be internal and will be used for IP only, and the plan is to (eventually) putting a stack of Cisco catalyst 3750s at the remote end.
Other than patching fibre to switches and media converters, I've had a very limited amount of experience with fibre installations in the past (used a fusion splicer many years ago), but other than that I'm a fibre installation newbie, so I'm looking for some help regarding the type of fibre I should be purchasing for the job.
Looking around, I see many different types OM1/OM2/OM3/OS1, single/multi mode, 62.5/125 or 50/125, Tight buffered / Loose Tube.
Had budget not been an issue, I'd have got a contractor in, but this really isn't an option at the moment, so can anyone make any recommendations, or offer any good sources of information to make sure I purchase the correct cable type?
p.s. UK based if different standards are relevant - although I guess you can probably tell that I'm UK based from my spelling of 'Fibre'.
For the lengths you're talking about just use LC-LC OM3, it'll support up to 10GbE and 8Gb FC as well as slower speeds, is relatively cheap and useable by just about every modern SFP/+ etc.
Oh and try minitran.co.uk, I find them excellent.
edit - have a look at the bottom three items in THIS list ok.