Basic Principles for Campus Network Product Selection

I am Xia Jie, a lecturer at 51CTO Academy. On the occasion of the 51CTO Academy's "4.20 IT Charging Festival" (April 19-20), I would like to share with you my experience in selecting campus network products.

What products are included in Campus Network?

As shown in the figure above, small and medium-sized networks may only include switches, firewalls or routers. However, in addition to the most common switches and routers, large campus networks also have wireless, security (firewall/intrusion detection/behavior management/antivirus, etc.), and optimization products (flow control/caching/APM, etc.).

Basic Principles for Campus Network Product Selection

1. Meet needs (usage needs, user requirements, deep-level needs)

Usage requirements: I have 1,000 people, you can't give me a device that can only support 500 people.

User requirement: Although 100M is also acceptable, the user requires a full Gigabit network.

Deeper needs: This is more complicated, but it can be summed up as money and power. If the customer wants to make money, they will generally choose high-end products and expand the project (why? Imagine: if the project is 1 million yuan, and you promise to give the customer a 20% rebate, it will only be 200,000 yuan. If the project is 5 million yuan, the customer can earn 1 million yuan); if the customer wants to make the project a model/industry benchmark, you need to promote new products/new solutions to the customer (such as SDN, cloud computing, virtualization, etc.)

2. Scalability (performance, functionality, interface)

As the name suggests, for example, there are only 500 people now, and it will be expanded to 1,000 people in the future (if you don't know how many people there will be in the future, the switch interface generally considers 30% redundancy); now use Gigabit uplink, and use 10 Gigabit uplink in the future, and use IPSEC VPN in the future, etc. When selecting products, you must consider the future performance/function/interface expansion.

3. Bid control (consider the later bidding during the product selection and scheme design stage)

Sometimes, multiple products can be selected for product selection and solution design, such as both firewalls and routers can be selected for export. The impact of bidding needs to be considered, such as which product is easier to control the bid and can raise the price of competitors.

4. Budget/rebates (“Chinese characteristics”, everyone earns more by selling high-end products)

Many of the projects we do are financed by the government, which means that we spend “public” money (education, medical care, government, and military industry are all no exception). For example, if you apply for a budget of 500 this year, but you don’t use it all, the government will recover it at the end of the year, and your budget will be blocked next year. So everyone will find that many products in our actual projects are higher than the actual demand. The kickback issue has been discussed in the previous special needs.

5. Flexible control/experience (no uniform standard)

The product selection for actual projects is very flexible. For example, for network egress, you can often choose routers, firewalls, or even behavior management or flow control devices. All of them have routing functions and can do NAT. You need to make flexible controls based on your own habits and experience.

51CTO Academy 4.20 IT Charging Festival

(On the 19th and 20th, 100 video courses are free to grab, and members can enjoy a 40% discount on video courses, non-members can enjoy a 30% discount, and packages can enjoy an additional 20% discount, and micro-jobs can enjoy a huge discount of 2,000 yuan)

Activity link: http://edu..com/activity/lists/id-47.html?wenzhang

Related video tutorials:

Network Engineer Series Video Course [Product Selection] (Routing + Switching + Security)

http://edu..com/course/course_id-7400.html