CCIE Professional Development: Advanced IP Network Design
Authors: Russ White, Don Slice
Venue:  (1999)

From the Book:The inevitable law of networks seems to be the following: Anything that is small will grow large, anything that is large will grow into something huge, and anything that is huge will grow into a multinational juggernaut. The corollary to this law seems to be as follows: Once a network has become a multinational juggernaut, someone will come along and decide to switch from one routing protocol to another. They will add one more application, or a major core link will flap, and it will melt (during dinner, of course). In CCIE Professional Development: Advanced IP Network Design, we intend to present the basic concepts necessary to build a scalable network. Because we work in the "it's broken, fix it (yesterday!)" side of the industry, these basics will be covered through case studies as well as theoretical discussion. This book covers good ways to design things, some bad ways to design things, and general design principles. When it seems appropriate, we'll even throw in some troubleshooting tips for good measure. You will find the foundation that is necessary for scaling your network into whatever size it needs to be (huge is preferred, of course). What Is Covered CCIE Professional Development: Advanced IP Network Design is targeted to networking professionals who already understand the basics of routing and routing protocols and want to move to the next step. A list of what's not covered in this book follows: Anything other than Cisco routers--You wouldn't expect Cisco Press to publish a book with sample configurations from some other vendor, would you? Router configuration--You won't learn how to configure a Cisco routerin CCIE Professional Development: Advanced IP Network Design. The primary focus is on architecture and principles. We expect that everyone who reads this book will be able to find the configuration information that they need in the standard Cisco manuals. Routing protocol operation--The appendixes cover the basic operation of the protocols used in the case studies, but this isn't the primary focus of our work. Routing protocol choice--All advanced routing protocols have strengths and weaknesses. Our intent isn't to help you decide which one is the best, but we might help you decide which one is the best fit for your network. (Static routes have always been a favorite, though.) RIP and IGRP--These are older protocols that we don't think are well suited to large scale network design. They may be mentioned here, but there isn't any extensive treatment of them. Router sizing, choosing the right router for a given traffic load, and so forth--These are specific implementation details that are best left to another book. There are plenty of books on these topics that are readily available. LAN or WAN media choice, circuit speeds, or other physical layer requirements--While these are important to scalability, they are not related to IP network design directly and are covered in various other books on building networks from a Layer 1 and 2 perspective. OSPF, IS-IS, EIGRP, and BGP are included because they are advanced protocols, each with various strengths and weaknesses that are widely deployed in large-scale networks today. We don't doubt that other protocols will be designed in the future. Good design is focused on in this book because the foundations of good design remain the same regardless of the link speeds, physical technologies, switching technology, switching speed, or routing protocol used. You won't get network stability by installing shiny, new Layer 2 switches or shiny, new super-fast routers. You won't get network stability by switching from one advanced routing protocol to another (unless your network design just doesn't work well with the one you are using). Network stability doesn't even come from making certain that no one touches any of the routers (although, sometimes it helps). You will get long nights of good sleep by putting together a well-designed network that is built on solid principles proven with time and experience. Motivation for the Book The main reason that we wrote this book is because we couldn't find any other books we liked that covered these topics. We also wrote it because we believe that Layer 3 network design is one of the most important and least covered topics in the networking field. We hope you enjoy reading CCIE Professional Development: Advanced IP Network Design and will use it as a reference for years to come. So, sit back in your favorite easy chair and peruse the pages. You can tell your boss that you're scaling the network!