Enterprise Network Design
Ben Piper · 2020
This chapter describes the different design principles used in an enterprise network. It also explains how different layer 2 designs influence traffic patterns, which in turn influence bandwidth and reliability. The physical design is the first important decision you'll make when designing or revising a network. The physical topology of a network is its least flexible and most unforgiving aspect. If you botch a configuration, you can fix it with a few keystrokes. If you botch the physical design, it can lead to poor performance and even downtime. A poor physical design can't be fixed with configuration commands. The physical design also determines the network's scalability in terms of the number of devices that can use it and how much data they can push through it. Good physical network design isn't hard, but the physical design of a network strongly influences its cost, and not everyone can afford to build a dream network right out of the gate. As with many technology buzzwords, the term “enterprise network” gets thrown around a lot without any clear definition. Although there isn't a unanimously accepted definition of the term, we can loosely define an enterprise network as a private network that's under the control of a single organization and that consists of at least one of two types of networks: campus networks and data center networks.