Defining Network Components
A data internetwork helps an organization increase productivity by linking all the computers and computer networks so that people have access to the information regardless of differences in time, location, or type of computer equipment.
The picture above shows that the network is defined based on grouping employees (user) in the following says:
- The main office is where everyone is connected to a LAN and where the majority of the corporate information is located. A main office could have hundreds or thousand of user who depend on the network to do their jobs. The main office might be a building with many LANs or might be a campus of such buildings. Because everyone needs access to central resources and information, it is common to see a high-speed backbone LAN as well as a centralized data center with mainframe computers and application servers.
- The other connections are a variety of remote access locations that need to connect to the resources at the main offices and each other, including the following:
- Branch offices – These are remote locations where smaller groups of people work. These users connect to each other via LAN. To access the main office, these users access WAN services. Although some information might be stored at the branch office, most of the data users access is likely at main office. How often the main office network is accessed determines whether the WAN connection will be a permanent or dial-up connection.
- Telecommuters – These employees work out of their homes. These users typically require an on-demand connection to the main office and be the branch office to access network resources.
- Mobile users – These individuals work from various locations and rely on different services to connect to the network. While at the main or branch offices, these users connect to the LAN. When they are out of the office, they usually rely on dial-up services or high-speed Internet access links to connect to the corporate network using Virtual Private Network (VPN) services.
To understand what the types of equipment and services to deploy in your network and when, it is important to understand business and user needs. You can then subdivide the network into a hierarchical model that spans from the end user’s machine to the core (backbone) of the network.
Tagged topology