Cisco Network Design Solutions for Small-Medium Businesses
Reviewer Name: Alan Sardella, Consultant
Reviewer Certification: CCDP
Rating: ***** out of *****
Cisco Network Design Solutions for Small-Medium Businesses outlines the networking needs of SMBs across the whole "yellow pages" of vertical markets. When dealing with a topic this extensive, an author has to make choices between depth and breadth. While the book does not delve too deeply into configuration or deployment use cases, it does manage to touch on pretty much every solution Cisco offers the SMB market. It is a comprehensive resource for a partner or reseller to help design an SMB network. By covering the SMB market in such detail, the book actually winds up touching on most of the major solutions (including enterprise) in networking today.
For the small business owner, it's probably a bit steep on the technical detail for a first-step resource, but if you are already networking savvy or have able to dig a little deeper to get more vital information, you'll find this book quite useful. It’s worth noting that there isn't any mention of the Linksys offerings; thus, it appears that this book is aimed at the "larger than the smallest" SMB market; it certainly is not applicable to small office/home office (SOHO).
Throughout the book the author puts forth a poignant and true-ringing analogy about the direction of networking vis a vis its apparent commoditization. Networking appears to be en route, however quickly and completely, to a kind of utility basis, wherein we will come to see it as increasingly plug and play, and perhaps as reliable, as electrical and plumbing systems. Although it is questionable whether networking can ever attain such a status, especially inasmuch as the applications get more complex with IPT, wireless, and storage, the trend in that direction is apparent (and welcome!).
The first part of the book covers the network design process and the profiles on different small and medium-sized businesses. It takes into consideration the key requirements of an SMB network: high performance, scalability, and "built within budget." This section includes an interesting overview of the networking infrastructure, including cable plant and storage requirements. There is a very useful checklist of design document components including requirements, cost/benefit analysis, implementation details, and so forth.
The second, and larger, part of the book details specific network solutions. These include security, remote access, IP telephony, wireless, partner collaboration, customer care, and front/back office collaboration. The security topic is divided into two chapters, the first dealing with the impact of the wide variety of security breaches (such as DDoS, man-in-the-middle attacks, zombies, worms, etc.). The other security chapter covers details on VPNs (in terms of the encryption technologies, appliances such as concentrators to manage them, and management advantages), firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and security functionality in the Cisco IOS. After detailing the requirements for VPNs (authentication, encryption, flexibility, scalability), a variety of VPN topologies (hub and spoke versus full mesh) and technologies (IPSec, SSL, and GRE) are discussed. It then covers advanced topics such as Dynamic Multipoint VPNs (DMVPN). Firewall technologies and capabilities such as DMZ creation, NAT, static packet filtering, and stateful inspection are discussed in detail.
Wireless LANs (WLAN) are tackled next, and the book provides excellent product descriptions of access points, wireless routers and bridges, switching requirements, site survey issues, the different standards, and the security implementation. There are several unique security issues related to wireless networking; examples include rogue access points and eavesdropping. There are many authentication and encryption technologies available for WLANs, partly because this is a new area and partly because the original WEP encryption proved to be fairly easy to hack. The performance and topology considerations of WLANs also get a little bit dense because of the many ways that wireless signals can be interrupted. Thus, a serious discussion on WLAN technology needs to cover such topics as radio frequencies, relevant standards (802.11 a/b/g), transmit power, and antenna types. The Cisco Aironet family of access points is discussed in detail.
The CRM chapter deals with the relevant Cisco products (e.g., IPCC) to customer care. This is a relatively nebulous area because it is really so business dependent that it’s hard to find a one-size-fits-all solution. But the Cisco Contact Center product description gives a very good idea of the current state of the solution.
The IP Telephony chapter covers the Cisco Call Manager (CCM) Express and other CCM IPT solutions, including deployment options. It first discusses the lower-level technical details such as echo, delay and jitter, and then goes on to discuss IPT standards and protocols, and relevant products such as gateways, gatekeepers, PBXs, and IP phones. Then integrated IPT solutions are discussed along with integrated call manager deployments. Finally it covers integration issues such as dial plans and integration with legacy PBXes. Issues related to unified messaging (e.g., getting your voice messages via email, and vice versa) are discussed in the following chapter, followed by front office/back office integration (detailing applications such as order processing and inventory management).
Overall, this well written and smartly illustrated book hits the mark and rates 5 stars out of 5.