About the Book

The Art of Network Architecture

Business-Driven Design

The business-centered, business-driven guide to architecting and evolving networks

The Art of Network Architecture is the first book that places business needs and capabilities at the center of the process of architecting and evolving networks. Two leading enterprise network architects help you craft solutions that are fully aligned with business strategy, smoothly accommodate change, and maximize future flexibility.

Russ White and Denise Donohue guide network designers in asking and answering the crucial questions that lead to elegant, high-value solutions. Carefully blending business and technical concerns, they show how to optimize all network interactions involving flow, time, and people.

The authors review important links between business requirements and network design, helping you capture the information you need to design effectively. They introduce today's most useful models and frameworks, fully addressing modularity, resilience, security, and management. Next, they drill down into network structure and topology, covering virtualization, overlays, modern routing choices, and highly complex network environments.

In the final section, the authors integrate all these ideas to consider four realistic design challenges: user mobility, cloud services, Software Defined Networking (SDN), and today's radically new data center environments.

- Understand how your choices of technologies and design paradigms will impact your business

- Customize designs to improve workflows, support BYOD, and ensure business continuity

- Use modularity, simplicity, and network management to prepare for rapid change

- Build resilience by addressing human factors and redundancy

- Design for security, hardening networks without making them brittle

- Minimize network management pain, and maximize gain

- Compare topologies and their tradeoffs

- Consider the implications of network virtualization, and walk through an MPLS-based L3VPN example

- Choose routing protocols in the context of business and IT requirements

- Maximize mobility via ILNP, LISP, Mobile IP, host routing, MANET, and/or DDNS

- Learn about the challenges of removing and changing services hosted in cloud environments

- Understand the opportunities and risks presented by SDNs

- Effectively design data center control planes and topologies

About the Author: Russ White, CCIE No. 2635, is a principal engineer in the IPOS team at Ericsson. He has worked in routing protocols and routed network design for the past 15 years. Russ has spoken at Cisco Live, Interop, LACNOG, and other global industry venues. He is actively involved in the IETF and the ISOC, has co-authored more than 30 software patents in the area of network protocols, and has co-authored nine books in the area of network protocols, design, and architecture. He holds a Master of Information Technology in Network Design and Architecture from Capella University and a Master of Christian Ministry in Christian literature from Shepherds Theological Seminary.

Denise Donohue, CCIE No. 9566 (Routing and Switching), is a senior solutions architect with Chesapeake NetCraftsmen. Denise has worked with computer systems since the mid-1990s, focusing on network design since 2004. During that time she has designed for a wide range of networks, private and public, of all sizes, across most industries. Denise has also authored or co-authored many Cisco Press books covering data and voice networking technologies and spoken at Cisco Live and other industry events.