Cabletron Systems bridges, switches manual Workgroup Establishment Criteria, Geographical Proximity

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.

		Workgroups
A8	A6	A4	A2
A7	A5	A3	A1

: Service Workstations

: Sales Workstations L1

: Research Workstations

: Receiving Workstations

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.

The Role of the Workgroup 5-3