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LAN Design
Jess Manuel Ros Olivas
Information Technologies 8th Level
Introduction
On business that are just growing up or those ones that can be considered as medium-sized, one very important thing to survive between all the other companies, is to communicate digitally through video, voice and data. Nowadays a Local Area Network (LAN) with a great design is what they need to stay into the business world. When you are designing a LAN you have to know how a good LAN looks like and which devices are required to do what the company wants. It is known when people have a good network design if the additions dont affect the entire network, when the network can be double or triple in size without changing the design and when the troubleshooting is easy. Through the last decade there have been a lot of changes in networking. Thats the reason Cisco developed The hierarchical network design, to support those changes. On this project, people will learn about the switched LAN architecture and things that are needed to know how to design a hierarchical network. Using a hierarchical design gives more possibilities to satisfy the requirements of the company where people are working at. On this kind of design you can expand and manage the network with very easy and less problems. This can be very useful for new people on the company, because is easier to find the problems in the network. One important advantage is that it can minimize costs and get a better performance because people can choose the appropriate kind of device for each layer. If it just need a device with one function on the access layer, people are not going to put an expensive device with a lot of functions, instead of that, they are going to put a cheap device with the specific function that is needed for that layer. And finally, one essential thing is that is very easy to understand because it has a simply design of just three sections. The hierarchical design consists of 3 layers, which are access, distribution and core. Each layer has a different work on the network; there is when we get a better performance of our network because you split all the work into 3 different sections.
adding new devices it can be very simple because the configuration can be copied from another device of the same type just doing some little changes.
Maintainability: They are very easy to main because it has an easy scalability;
maintainability in other designs would be complicated as the network grows. The selection of the devices is very simple because people already know the functions of every layer. It allow saving a lot of money by doing the correct selection of a switch for every layer.
Conclusion
Basically, doing a network with a hierarchical design gives great results, and is very simple because people just need to know which and how many devices are going to be connected on the access layer, knowing this, the quantity of switches in the distribution layer can be determined. After the distribution layer is done, people can know how many devices on the core layer are needed to give a better performance to the network. Following the principles there wont be any problem on the process of creating a local area network using The Hierarchical Model Design.
References Cisco. (n.d.). Cisco Systems. Retrieved June 15, 2011, from Cisco Networking Academy: http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/netacad/index.html SemSim.com. (n.d.). MC MCSE. Retrieved July 15, 2011, from MC MCSE Certification Resources: http://www.mcmcse.com/cisco/guides/hierarchical_model.shtml