A good network design is an important step to bringing a Ceph cluster online. If your networking is handled by another team, make sure that they are included at all stages of the design as often an existing network will not be designed to handle Ceph's requirements, leading to both poor Ceph performance as well as impacting existing systems.
It's recommended that each Ceph node be connected via redundant links to two separate switches so that in the event of a switch failure, the Ceph node is still accessible. Stacking switches should be avoided if possible, as they can introduce single points of failure and in some cases are both required to be offline to carry out firmware upgrades.
If your Ceph cluster will be contained ...
