Achieving Optimal Redundancy in a Small Business Network

Redundancy is a highly desirable element of the network, but sometimes it is not so easy to find the optimal level of redundancy that will ensure satisfactory performance of the entire network and at the same time being affordable and easy to implement. Redundancy in the network can be performed in several ways, which can be compatible and co-exist in the network, but can also be mutually exclusive. Although at first it seems that the redundancy depends only on the size of the network, this is not entirely true. One of the main factors to take into account is the complexity of the network and the importance of services and applications that serve the company's business and its customers. Network redundancy can be achieved in various ways. STP for example is the most basic mechanism but has several major drawbacks like underutilization of some links. Also link aggregation mechanisms could be used, which usually means investing in optical transcievers which implies a certain cost, and if one is using switch stacking it will further increase costs. For gateway redundancy one of FHRP protocols can be used which is certainly desirable. This paper will describe the redundancy in Small and Medium networks with few hundred clients and one way how to ensure redundancy by using various mechanisms such as the STP protocol, link aggregation, implementation of FHRP for gateway redundancy and using stackable switches with short analysis of recovery times for these mechanisms.