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Designing an enterprise infrastructure requires a broad view of the network's overall picture. Infrastructure design requires an understanding of the organizational network borders (geography) and the existing and planned application usage.
Cabling is one of the biggest long-term investments in network deployment. Therefore, transmission media selection depends not only on the required bandwidth and distances, but also on the emerging technologies that might be deployed over the same infrastructure in the future. The designer must thoroughly evaluate the cost of the medium (including installation costs) and the available budget in addition to the technical characteristics, such as signal attenuation and electromagnetic interference. Two major cabling options exist: copper-based media (for example, unshielded twisted pair [UTP]) and optical fiber.
The cabling infrastructure gives clients the opportunity to build high performance and highly reliability networks—if they follow correct design approaches. Unfortunately, some alternative design approaches can result in a network that has lower performance, reliability, and manageability.
You should consider the following two factors when planning the infrastructure requirements for your enterprise network:
Network geography—The distribution of network nodes (for example, host or network devices) and the distances between them significantly affect the enterprise solution—especially the physical transmission media.
Network applications—In terms of bandwidth and delay, the application requirements place stringent requirements on an enterprise network solution.
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