Advice needed on topology

[Cory Dryden]

Morning team,

I need some advice on this topology layout. The four switches connected together in the picture are for our SAN LAN. It only has one connection coming out to the core. I did not set this up and would like a better way of connecting it all and provide some redundancy, but should I just add the links in blue or is there a better way? It just looks overkill.

Any help would be great. Black links are the current links in place.

[srikanth ath]

Hello,

what kind of a setup ou are looking for?

First q:

1. Are you looking to change the entire topology (with redundancy links, active and passive at core level).

2. Is it your Lab setup or Production setup

the reason being is if it is a production setup, we can make few changes in topology without disturbing the existing setup with minimum downtime.

Regards,

srikanth 

[Rick Morris]

In order to provide suggested designs it is important to know what you are trying to accomplish and how the traffic flows.  You have two segments just below the core, if you connect directly there will be spanning-tree details you will need to factor in, unless you are using layer 3.  You have first hop redundancy you can use, like HSRP or GLBP.

What I would do, without knowing the details is, connected the switches down stream from the core by dual attaching, meaning connect the downstream switch to both core devices.  I would not connect the two together as you have indicated with the blue line between the two down stream switches, spanning tree will potentially block those ports to avoid any loops.  I would also etherchannel the uplinks to provide more throughput between the core and the downstream switch.

[Cory Dryden]

Thanks guys,

1. My core switch links more of the network to it, this part is just our SAN LAN which is connected here and then replicates to out disarster site across the WAN.

2. It is production

My reason for wanting to change it is, I think there is a real vunrebility with just havign one link and one switch connected to the core. If that goes down, heaps of servers loose connection to the SAN. This is a L2 network. The default gateway for the SAN actualy sits on one of the core switches, the one with no connection into the SAN LAN. In the below picture I have marked which switch has the default gateway for the SAN and STP rooot.