Networking Best Practices

Providing High Availability

Besides providing an additional level of security, server clusters are frequently necessary to provide high availability for complex applications and services. A good network must be able to reduce the possible impact of failures. This defense enables the net to meet business requirements at any time.

Providing Redundancy

To provide high availability, servers are redundantly linked to two different switches at the Access Layer. This design offers a route from the server to the secondary switch if the first-primary device fails. Switches at the Distribution and Core Layers are also redundantly linked. Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol can also manage redundant Layer 2 links. A router that runs the Hot Standby Router Protocol is able to offer support for Layer 3 redundancy and failover.

Virtualization

A few different virtual servers can be installed on one physical server. The physical server has an operating system designed to run several virtual images. This design is well-known as virtualization. Virtual servers decrease the cost of providing redundant services, failover and load balancing for important network services.

Customer Requests

Before planning an internal wireless local area network, the network architect should fully understand how the client wants to use the WIFI network.

The architect understands the network requirements by asking the client questions. The provided answers affect how a WIFI network is designed and implemented.

If the architect does not receive good answers to his questions or fully recognize the client’s needs, installing a WIFI network will be challenging, if not impossible. For instance, the requirements to offer unsecured hotspots are considerably less difficult to plan than authenticated access to secure internal devices.

Physical Network Plan

In old-classic WIFI networks, most of the energy goes to the physical coverage areas of the net.

The network architect creates a site survey to define the coverage areas for the net and to discover the best places for installing wireless Access Points. This report helps to define the Access Point hardware and the preferred wireless feature sets. The architect must also decide if roaming among overlapping coverage areas can be supported.

Logical Network Design

Planning the logical network typically causes network architects the most difficulty. Clients frequently want to deliver different levels of access to different users. Furthermore, WIFI nets must be both easy to use and protected. Determining the desired features presents numerous different methods to design and configure wireless networks. Open wireless access for visitors and secured wireless access for mobile employees are two common requirements that most of the modern companies have.