A campus network is a building or group of buildings connected into one enterprise network that consists of many LANs. A campus is generally limited to a fixed geographic area, but it can span several neighboring buildings, for example, an industrial complex or business park environment. Regional offices, SOHOs, and mobile workers may need to connect to the central campus for data and information.
The enterprise campus module describes the recommended methods to create a scalable network, while addressing the needs of campus-style business operations. The architecture is modular and can easily expand to include additional campus buildings or floors as the enterprise grows.
The enterprise campus module consists of the following submodules:
- Building access
- Building distribution
- Campus core
- Data center
Together these submodules:
- Provide high availability through a resilient hierarchical network design.
- Integrate IP communications, mobility, and advanced security.
- Utilize multicast traffic and QoS to optimize network traffic.
- Provide increased security and flexibility using access management, VLANs and IPSec VPNs.
The enterprise campus module architecture provides the enterprise with high availability through a resilient multilayer design, redundant hardware and software features, and automatic procedures for reconfiguring network paths when failures occur. Integrated security protects against and mitigates the impact of worms, viruses, and other attacks on the network, even at the switch port level.
A high-capacity, centralized data center module can provide internal server resources to users. The data center module typically also supports network management services for the enterprise, including monitoring, logging, troubleshooting, and other common management features from end to end. The data center submodule typically contains internal email and corporate servers that provide application, file, print, email, and Domain Name System (DNS) services to internal users.
Click the enterprise campus module in the figure for more information.