Top-Down Network Design, Rough Cuts, 3rd Edition

Description

This is the Rough Cut version of the printed book.

Objectives

The purpose of Top-Down Network Design, Third Edition, is to help you design networks that meet a customer’s business and technical goals. Whether your customer is another department within your own company or an external client, this book provides you with tested processes and tools to help you understand traffic flow, protocol behavior, and internetworking technologies. After completing this book, you will be equipped to design enterprise networks that meet a customer’s requirements for functionality, capacity, performance, availability, scalability, affordability, security, and manageability.

Audience

This book is for you if you are an internetworking professional responsible for designing and maintaining medium- to large-sized enterprise networks. If you are a network engineer, architect, or technician who has a working knowledge of network protocols and technologies, this book will provide you with practical advice on applying your knowledge to internetwork design.

This book also includes useful information for consultants, systems engineers, and sales engineers who design corporate networks for clients. In the fast-paced presales environment of many systems engineers, it often is difficult to slow down and insist on a top-down, structured systems analysis approach. Wherever possible, this book includes shortcuts and assumptions that can be made to speed up the network design process.

Finally, this book is useful for undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and information technology disciplines. Students who have taken one or two courses in networking theory will find Top-Down Network Design, Third Edition, an approachable introduction to the engineering and business issues related to developing real-world networks that solve typical business problems.

Changes for the Third Edition

Networks have changed in many ways since the second edition was published. Many legacy technologies have disappeared and are no longer covered in the book. In addition, modern networks have become multifaceted, providing support for numerous bandwidth-hungry applications and a variety of devices, ranging from smart phones to tablet PCs to high-end servers. Modern users expect the network to be available all the time, from any device, and to let them securely collaborate with coworkers, friends, and family. Networks today support voice, video, high-definition TV, desktop sharing, virtual meetings, online training, virtual reality, and applications that we can’t even imagine that brilliant college students are busily creating in their dorm rooms.

As applications rapidly change and put more demand on networks, the need to teach a systematic approach to network design is even more important than ever. With that need in mind, the third edition has been retooled to make it an ideal textbook for college students. The third edition features review questions and design scenarios at the end of each chapter to help students learn top-down network design.

To address new demands on modern networks, the third edition of Top-Down Network Design also has updated material on the following topics:

ß Network redundancy

ß Modularity in network designs

ß The Cisco SAFE security reference architecture

ß The Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP)

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Sample Content

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I Identifying Your Customer’s Needs and Goals

Chapter 1 Analyzing Business Goals and Constraints 3

Using a Top-Down Network Design Methodology 3

    Using a Structured Network Design Process 5

    Systems Development Life Cycles 6

    Plan Design Implement Operate Optimize (PDIOO) Network Life Cycle 7

Analyzing Business Goals 8

    Working with Your Client 8

    Changes in Enterprise Networks 10

        Networks Must Make Business Sense 10

        Networks Offer a Service 11

        The Need to Support Mobile Users 12

        The Importance of Network Security and Resiliency 12

    Typical Network Design Business Goals 13

    Identifying the Scope of a Network Design Project 14

    Identifying a Customer’s Network Applications 16

Analyzing Business Constraints 19

    Politics and Policies 19

    Budgetary and Staffing Constraints 20

    Project Scheduling 21

Business Goals Checklist 22

Summary 23

Review Questions 23

Design Scenario 24

Chapter 2 Analyzing Technical Goals and Tradeoffs 25

Scalability 25

    Planning for Expansion 26

    Expanding Access to Data 26

    Constraints on Scalability 27

Availability 27

    Disaster Recovery 28

    Specifying Availability Requirements 29

        Five Nines Availability 30

        The Cost of Downtime 31

        Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time to Repair 31

Network Performance 32

    Network Performance Definitions 33

    Optimum Network Utilization 34

    Throughput 35

        Throughput of Internetworking Devices 36

        Application Layer Throughput 37

    Accuracy 38

    Efficiency 39

    Delay and Delay Variation 40

        Causes of Delay 41

        Delay Variation 43

    Response Time 44

Security 44

    Identifying Network Assets 45

    Analyzing Security Risks 46

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Updates

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