Advices: what do you think about this network infrastructure

[Nathan.Less]

Hello...

I would like to know what do you think about a wired network configured as described in the attached image. I think it's a bit dangerous to

have such infrastructure... anyway I found it set up on my new job, they used it for 2 weeks and are satisfied.

what do you think?

many manny thanks!

alternative image link: http://oi51.tinypic.com/eopcl.jpg

[kapathak]

How is redundancy achieved in this scenario? Say, what happens if switch 24 goes down for some reason, or even any other intermediate switch? How do the end hosts still maintain access to rest of the network?

[Chad Peterson]

Hi Marcello,

The biggest concern I would have about the network is the lack of redundancy.  Having only 1 switch connecting everything is a very large single point of failure.  Also when you chain switches together it also is now prone to faile when a link in the chain higher up fails, everything below fails too.

I'm sure it works, and depending on the amount of traffic they are pushing it may wok for them for some time...but if a failure occurs it could affect most of their network.

Chad

[Nathan.Less]

I see... and I totally agree with you.

When I saw the configuration I thought the same.

However, they have frequent but poor amount of traffic (in the order of bytes).

So... what do you suggest?

Eliminate the chains centralizing all the connection into three main 24port switch? (Fisically it is impossibile

to have all the cables ending in the same location).

[jonathanaxford]

The lack of redundancy is definitely a concern, but without having an idea of the physcial restarints in place (Cable runs etc) it is hard to get an idea of what you could do. For example, if it is going to be expensive to introduce redundant links between switches then I guess it would be up to the customer as to what they want - some people seem to be happy without any resilience in their networks!

If i was in your shoes, i would definitely be concerned too though!

Cheers

Jonathan

[kapathak]

Its difficult to pin down the exact plan without knowing the physical constraints of the network, but I would ensure that every node (switch) has atleast two paths to a core switch (or main switch(es)) in order to avoid any downtime during link failures.