Time to Rethink Network Design?
It’s been a little more than 20 years since I designed my first from-scratch cable plant, but one basic fact hasn’t changed, no matter how much the physical media and the wire protocols have evolved. That eternal truth is really quite simple: The boss and the users don’t care about the network until it ceases to work. Then they care a lot.
The good news is that the physical and link layers are much easier to deal with than they were in my Wild West days. There’s no more weighing the pros and cons of Token Ring compared with Ethernet, no more coaxial cables running from one workstation to the next, no more IBM Type 1 shielded twisted-pair cables to wrestle with, and available bandwidth to the desktop is 100 times what we had to work with in those days. But the bad news is that we may need to rethink the way we connect desktops to the network if VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) ceases to be a novelty and becomes part of the norm.
That’s because, as a rule, desktops connect through a single port on a single access switch. Switches are reliable enough that such a connection strategy works, and modern cabling plants can withstand most physical stresses. But latency can prove to be a silent killer, making the best-planned VDI deployment into a nightmare, no matter what the underlying cause.
