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:

¿ Network redundancy

¿ Modularity in network designs

¿ The Cisco SAFE security reference architecture

¿ The Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP)

¿ Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)

¿ Ethernet scalability options, including 10-Gbps Ethernet and Metro Ethernet

¿ Network design and management tools