Cabletron Systems Cabletron BRIM-F6, Networking Manual

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The Role of the Workgroup 5-3
Network Design
Workgroup Establishment Criteria
This section examines some of the methods that may be used to divide the
population mass of end users of a network into cohesive and defined
workgroups.
Geographical Proximity
Organizing workgroups by geographical proximity creates workgroups made up
of discrete sections of a facility, as shown in Figure 5-1. While in many cases the
physical locations of departments may correspond exactly to a facility layout, the
geographical proximity criteria of workgroup organization does not take function
into account. As the deciding criteria for this type of workgroup organization is
location only, geographical proximity is often the least efficient workgroup
creation method in terms of performance, reliability, and troubleshooting.
Figure 5-1. Geographical Proximity Workgroups
Having well defined rules of geographical proximity as the deciding factor in
workgroup design does, however, make the physical act of fault recovery easier in
many networks. If an entire location is suffering errors or loss of network
operation, there is a defined physical location to begin examining network
devices for faults.
A1
A2
A3
A4
A5
A6
A7
A8
L1
: Sales Workstations
: Research Workstations
: Service Workstations
: Receiving Workstations
Workgroups