The Art of Network Architecture: Business-Driven Design

The Art of Network Architecture: Business-Driven Design

by Denise Donohue, Russ White
Released April 2014
Publisher(s): Cisco Press
ISBN: 9780133259223

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Book Description

The Art of Network Architecture

Business-Driven Design

The business-centered, business-driven guide to architecting and evolving networks

The Art of Network Architecture is the first book that places business needs and capabilities at the center of the process of architecting and evolving networks. Two leading enterprise network architects help you craft solutions that are fully aligned with business strategy, smoothly accommodate change, and maximize future flexibility.

Russ White and Denise Donohue guide network designers in asking and answering the crucial questions that lead to elegant, high-value solutions. Carefully blending business and technical concerns, they show how to optimize all network interactions involving flow, time, and people.

The authors review important links between business requirements and network design, helping you capture the information you need to design effectively. They introduce today’s most useful models and frameworks, fully addressing modularity, resilience, security, and management. Next, they drill down into network structure and topology, covering virtualization, overlays, modern routing choices, and highly complex network environments.

In the final section, the authors integrate all these ideas to consider four realistic design challenges: user mobility, cloud services, Software Defined Networking (SDN), and today’s radically new data center environments.

•  Understand how your choices of technologies and design paradigms will impact your business

•  Customize designs to improve workflows, support BYOD, and ensure business continuity

•  Use modularity, simplicity, and network management to prepare for rapid change

•  Build resilience by addressing human factors and redundancy

•  Design for security, hardening networks without making them brittle

•  Minimize network management pain, and maximize gain

•  Compare topologies and their tradeoffs

•  Consider the implications of network virtualization, and walk through an MPLS-based L3VPN example

•  Choose routing protocols in the context of business and IT requirements

•  Maximize mobility via ILNP, LISP, Mobile IP, host routing, MANET, and/or DDNS

•  Learn about the challenges of removing and changing services hosted in cloud environments

•  Understand the opportunities and risks presented by SDNs

•  Effectively design data center control planes and topologies

Table of Contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. About the Authors
    1. About the Technical Reviewers
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. Contents at a Glance
  7. Contents
  8. Command Syntax Conventions
  9. Introduction
    1. What Is Network Architecture?
    2. Defining Architecture
    3. Get Out of the Silo
    4. Why Is Network Architecture an Art?
    5. A Look Ahead
    6. A Final Word
  10. Part I: Framing the Problem
    1. Chapter 1. Business and Technology
      1. Business Drives Technology
      2. Technology Drives Business
  11. Part II: Business Driven Design
    1. Chapter 2. Designing for Change
      1. Organic Growth and Decline
      2. Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestments
      3. Centralizing Versus Decentralizing
    2. Chapter 3. Improving Business Operations
      1. Workflow
      2. BYOD
      3. Business Continuity
      4. Summary
  12. Part III: Tools of the Trade
    1. Chapter 4. Models
      1. The Seven-Layer Model
      2. The Four-Layer Model
      3. Iterative Layering Model
      4. A Hybrid Model
      5. Reactive and Proactive
      6. The Waterfall Model
      7. Places in the Network
      8. Summary
    2. Chapter 5. Underlying Support
      1. Questions You Should Ask
      2. Spanning Tree
      3. TRILL
      4. Final Thoughts on the Physical Layer
    3. Chapter 6. Principles of Modularity
      1. Why Modularize?
      2. How Do You Modularize?
      3. Modularization and Optimization
      4. Summary
    4. Chapter 7. Applying Modularity
      1. What Is Hierarchical Design?
      2. Typical Hierarchical Design Patterns
      3. Virtualization
      4. Final Thoughts on Applying Modularity
    5. Chapter 8. Weathering Storms
      1. Redundancy as Resilience
      2. MTTR, Resilience, and Redundancy
      3. Fast Convergence Techniques
      4. Fast Reroute
      5. The Human Side of Resilience
    6. Chapter 9. Securing the Premises
      1. The OODA Loop
      2. Brittleness
      3. Building Defense In
      4. Some Practical Considerations
      5. Summary
    7. Chapter 10. Measure Twice
      1. Why Manage?
      2. Management Models
      3. Deploying Management
      4. Bare Necessities
      5. Summary
  13. Part IV: Choosing Materials
    1. Chapter 11. The Floor Plan
      1. Rings
      2. Full Mesh
      3. Clos Networks
      4. Partial Mesh
      5. Disjoint Parallel Planes
      6. Divergent Data Planes
      7. Cubes
      8. Toroid Topologies
      9. Summary
    2. Chapter 12. Building the Second Floor
      1. What Is a Tunnel?
      2. Fundamental Virtualization Questions
      3. MPLS-Based L3VPNs
      4. VXLAN
      5. Summary
    3. Chapter 13. Routing Choices
      1. Which Routing Protocol?
      2. IPv6 Considerations
      3. Deploying BGP
      4. Conclusion
    4. Chapter 14. Considering Complexity
      1. Control Plane State
      2. Control Plane Policy Dispersion
      3. Data Plane State
      4. Reaction Time
      5. Managing Complexity Trade-offs
  14. Part V: Current and Future Trends
    1. Chapter 15. Network in Motion
      1. The Business Case for Mobility
      2. Pinning the Hard Problems into Place
      3. IP-Centric Mobility Solutions
      4. Remote Access Solutions
      5. What Solution Should You Deliver?
    2. Chapter 16. On Psychologists, Unicorns, and Clouds
      1. A Cloudy History
      2. This Time It’s Different
      3. What Does It Cost?
      4. What Are the Risks?
      5. What Problems Can Cloud Solve Well?
      6. What Services Are Cloud Good at Providing?
      7. Deploying Cloud
      8. Flying Through the Cloud
      9. Looking Back Over the Clouds
    3. Chapter 17. Software-Defined Networks
      1. Understanding SDNs
      2. Software-Defined Network Use Cases
      3. Final Thoughts on SDNs
    4. Chapter 18. Data Center Design
      1. Data Center Spine and Leaf Fabrics
      2. The Control Plane Conundrum
      3. Network Virtualization in the Data Center
      4. Thoughts on Storage
      5. Modularity and the Data Center
      6. Summary

Product Information

  • Title: The Art of Network Architecture: Business-Driven Design
  • Author(s): Denise Donohue, Russ White
  • Release date: April 2014
  • Publisher(s): Cisco Press
  • ISBN: 9780133259223