Designing a Campus Network Design Topology
Campus network design topologies should meet a customer's goals for availability and performance by featuring small bandwidth domains, small broadcast domains, redundancy, mirrored servers, and multi| ways for a workstation to reach a router for off-net communications. Campus networks should be desig using a hierarchical, modular approach so that the network offers good performance, maintainability, ai scalability.
Most campus networks feature a high-performance, switched backbone, called the campus backbone, tl connects buildings and different parts of the campus. A high-capacity, centralized server farm connects the backbone and provides internal server resources to users, for example, application, file, print, e-ma and Domain Name System (DNS) services. Network management is an important component in a camp network design. A campus backbone must provide access to management devices that support monitor logging, troubleshooting, security, and other common management functions.
According to the Enterprise Composite Network Model, a campus consists of the campus infrastructure module, a server farm, a network management module, and an edge distribution module that provides connectivity between the campus and the rest of the internetwork. Figure 5-7 shows these modules and illustrates that the campus infrastructure module has three submodules:
• Building access submodule. Located within a campus building, this submodule contains end-u workstations and IP phones connected to switches or wireless access points. Higher-end switche provide uplinks to the building distribution module. Services offered by this module include netw access, broadcast control, protocol filtering, and the marking of packets for QoS features.
• Building distribution submodule. The job of this submodule is to aggregate wiring closets wil a building and provide connectivity to the campus backbone via routers (or switches with routing modules). This submodule provides routing, QoS, and access control methods for meeting secur and performance requirements. Redundancy and load sharing are recommended for this submoc For example, each building distribution submodule should have two equal-cost paths to the cam backbone.
• Campus backbone. The campus backbone is the core layer of the campus infrastructure. The backbone interconnects the building access and distribution submodules with the server farm, network management, and edge distribution modules. The campus backbone provides redundan and fast-converging connectivity. It routes and switches traffic as quickly as possible from one module to another. This module usually uses high-speed routers (or switches with routing capab and provides QoS and security features.
Continue reading here: The Spanning Tree Protocol
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