How to design for physical layer redundancy

[michaelngai]

Hi All,

Seeking a bit of advice here.

Have a requirement to design a flat L2 network for a small manufacturing plant with different buildings.  One of the requirement is to have physical layer redundancy, where there is a chance people would dig up the ground and cut off entire conduits.  Thus the requirement of having multiple conduits between buildings.

This means a lot of L2 loops and daisy chaining of selected buildings (switch).  

Is there a cleaner design to this rather than relying purely on STP to take care of things?  Is there anything in particular that we should be aware of?

At this stage, I can see roughly 14 switches in the entire design, scattered across multiple buildings.

Thanks in advance for any tips / advice.

[Elton Babcock]

What kind of switches will you have available to you or what is the budget on this?

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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How clean your design might be would depend on not just the count of your switches, but what's possible for physical interconnections.

Besides STP (would recommend RSTP or MST), some switches support REP and some Cisco switches support Flex Links.  There's also Etherchannel and switch stacking (e.g. 2960S, 2960X).

What's technologies you might use depend on your switches' features.  Which might be best, again, depends on what you physical topology might support.