Network Topologies

Hello Victor

Yes, your suggestion is excellent. This would allow traffic between buildings to avoid going through the New York router, offloading a lot of work from that device. It would also provide a level of redundancy, in case one of the core routers failed (if you enable something like load-balanced routing, HSRP, Stacking, or VSS.

You are correct again, that it would be beneficial to enable redundancy at the New York router, for both links, as well as in hardware. The NY router is a single point of failure that would cause a disconnection between multiple sites if it failed.

It’s good to keep in mind that in the real world, the best network design isn’t always strictly about what is best technologically. It also depends on things like cost, to whom the network belongs, as well as expected traffic patterns and usage. For example:

  • If the two buildings are not expected to have any traffic between them, then you can go without a link between the cores.
  • if the two buildings belong to two administratively disparate departments of the same company, it may not be according to policy to unify their networks.
  • Sometimes the cost, as you correctly mentioned, is a limiting factor in what you can actually do.

So network design also includes the idea of “do as much as you can with what you have”.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz