Chapter 5. Design Complexity

Anyone who’s been in the network or operations world for a long time has a story about a network topology that was simply overwhelming. Like the time the network designer for one large company stood in front of a flip chart of over a hundred pages hung on the wall of a conference room explaining the ins and outs of his network’s physical layer topology. Or the network that was built with hundreds of T1 speed links through a single campus because the bandwidth requirements had long ago overrun the capacity of ten or fifteen T1s in parallel, but the local telco wouldn’t offer any sort of larger link.

These large-scale failures in network design are often trotted out as the worst of the worst in complex networks because ...

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