Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches in Network Design
In network design, you can choose either a Top-down or Bottom-up approach. Choosing the right approach will help you achieve your desired outcomes. This method is often faster, but it can also cause missed requirements and compromises. When you choose a bottom-up approach, you lock in desired outcomes before you start designing the application layer. This layer is where the end-users will be doing their work. To select the right hardware and software, you must first determine what your network needs to accomplish.
Top-down vs bottom-up approach
The top-down approach is the most common and is more practical when you have a small team or don’t have the time to do the research necessary to select the best networking solution. In this approach, the top layers of the OSI stack are defined first, followed by the lower layers. This method is often quicker, but the end result is an inappropriate network. The downside of this approach is that it can take longer to design a network, especially if you have to buy new hardware and software.
In contrast, the top-down approach to networking starts with general applications, which doesn’t necessarily mean web servers, Internet Explorer, or VPNs. This approach to designing a network focuses on the services and applications a business needs and prioritizes these goals. During the top-down approach, an organization may be looking to implement new applications or integrate with a partner network, or a customer might be looking to enable an e-commerce platform, for example.
Redundancy
Network design incorporating redundancy requires careful analysis of customer goals. Redundant designs require the identification of critical systems, links, and applications. They also require a risk-tolerance and complexity analysis. The goal of redundancy is to provide a redundant system of data, links, and processes. When a network component fails, another one is used to keep operations running. This method can increase the complexity of network topology, routing, and addressing.
A common example of redundancy is rapid spanning tree, in which network traffic can be routed through two or more routers. This prevents the loss of a single packet. Redundancy is also used in Megaport, which offers multiple fallback plans in case one of the network links fails. Hence, it is important to analyze the impact of network failures and choose the appropriate redundancy strategy for your network.
Resiliency
Resilience in network design is a critical component for the protection of networks, since the network is the lifeblood of any business. It is how customers reach your business, how orders are processed, and how you manage your employees. To ensure the smooth functioning of your network, it needs to be as resilient and secure as possible. Several techniques have been proposed to achieve network resiliency. Dual-path architecture, an example of this approach, offers multiple paths for network traffic, which can protect against both physical and logical failures.
System survival is the ability to continue operating when faced with external threats, such as large-scale natural disasters. Fault tolerance and resilience are subsets of each other. The key to achieving resiliency is to develop resilient services. You can define ‘classes’ of resilience in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the services you provide. These ‘classes’ include hard guarantees, best efforts, and something in between. Once these are in place, monitoring and enforcing them is essential.
Disaster recovery
In the event of a disaster, downtime can cost a business a great deal of money, reputation, and productivity. It is therefore essential to have a Disaster Recovery solution in place for every business. Disaster recovery is also a vital aspect of any marketing strategy. Here are some ways to ensure a seamless recovery. Let us take a look at the various options available to your company and what they entail. This article will explore some of the most common options and discuss how you can implement them in your own business.
While data backup is an important feature of disaster recovery, it is insufficient to protect critical information. Back-up recovery involves backing up data off site in a removable storage device. This method of disaster recovery offers minimal business continuity assistance, but is not enough. Cold site recovery, in contrast, involves setting up a basic pbx phone system at a second location. While it can aid in business continuity, it does not protect data, and therefore, must be coupled with other methods of disaster recovery.