Cabletron Systems Cabletron BRIM-F6, Networking Manual

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Network Design
5-4 The Role of the Workgroup
Departmental Organization
Corporations, companies, and agencies all separate employees by primary
function. No one person “does it all,” and most employees are specialists in the
sense that they perform one function or a series of functions that are assigned to
them by their job descriptions. These functions dictate what types of information
and network usage they require: manufacturing personnel deal primarily with
manufacturing information; accounting personnel deal primarily with sales,
profit, and expenditure information; and research personnel primarily perform
design and testing operations.
Since most of the time business departments are involved with sharing
information among other members of their department or a group of related
departments (Accounting, Personnel, and Payroll, for example), the division of
the end user population into workgroups based on corporate function and
separated by bridges, switches, or routers tends to improve network performance
by keeping information passed within each department from impacting the flow
of information within other departments. This provides natural divisions within
the network, as shown in Figure 5-2, for the use of bridging or routing, keeping
local traffic from congesting the network where it is used by other departments.
Figure 5-2. Corporate Organization Workgroups
: Sales Workstations
: Research Workstations
: Receiving Workstations
: Workgroup A
: Workgroup B
: Workgroup C