VLANs are formed to group related users regardless of the physical connections of their hosts to the network. The users can be spread across geographically dispersed locations. By using VLANs, the network can take advantage of the following benefits:
  • Broadcast control-Just as switches physically isolate collision domains for attached hosts and only forward traffic out a particular port, VLANs provide logical collision domains that confine broadcast and multicast traffic to the bridging domain.
  • Security-If you do not include a router in a VLAN, no users outside of that VLAN can communicate with the users in the VLAN and vice versa. This extreme level of security can be highly desirable for certain projects and applications.
  • Performance-You can assign users that require high-performance networking to their own VLANs. You might, for example, assign an engineer who is testing a multicast application and the servers the engineer uses to a single VLAN. The engineer experiences improved network performance by being on a "dedicated LAN," and the rest of the engineering group experiences improved network performance because the traffic generated by the network-intensive application is isolated to another VLAN.
  • Network management-You can assign users to VLANs and, later, reassign them to another VLAN. Recabling to change connectivity is no longer necessary in the switched LAN environment because network management tools allow you to reconfigure the LAN logically in seconds.
Benefits
  • Increased performance
    Switched networks by nature will increase performance over shared media devices in use today, primarily by reducing the size of collision domains. Grouping users into logical networks will also increase performance by limiting broadcast traffic to users performing similar functions or within individual workgroups. Less traffic needs to be routed, and the latency added by routers will be reduced.
  • Improved manageability
    Comcentric VLAN Extension provides an easy, flexible, less costly way to modify logical groups in changing environments. VLAN Extensions make large networks more manageable by allowing centralized configuration of devices located in physically diverse locations.
  • Network tuning and simplification of software configurations
    VLAN Extension will allow LAN administrators to "fine tune" their networks by logically grouping users. Software configurations can be made uniform across machines with the consolidation of a department's resources into a single subnet. IP addresses, subnet masks, and local network protocols will be more consistent across the entire VLAN. Fewer implementations of local server resources such as BOOTP and DHCP will be needed in this environment. These services can be more effectively deployed when they can span buildings within a VLAN.
  • Physical topology independence
    Comcentric's VLAN Extensions provide independence from the physical topology of the network by allowing physically diverse workgroups to be logically connected within a single broadcast domain. If the physical infrastructure is already in place, it now becomes a simple matter to add ports in new locations to existing VLANs if a department expands or relocates. These assignments can take place in advance of the move, and it is then a simple matter to move devices with their existing configurations from one location to another. The old ports can then be "decommissioned" for future use, or reused by the department for new users on the VLAN.
  • Increased security options
    Our VLANs have the ability to provide additional security not available in a shared media network environment. By nature, a switched network delivers frames only to the intended recipients, and broadcast frames only to other members of the VLAN. This allows the network administrator to segment users requiring access to sensitive information into separate VLANs from the rest of the general user community regardless of physical location. In addition, monitoring of a port with a traffic analyzer will only view the traffic associated with that particular port, making discreet monitoring of network traffic more difficult.

    It should be noted that the enhanced security that is mentioned above is not to be considered an absolute safeguard against security infringements. What this provides is additional safeguards against "casual" but unwelcome attempts to view network traffic.

  • Management and Customization
    Comcentric Networking provides a managed service. You will work along with a trained VLAN consultant to establish your networking requirements and Comcentric will implement and manage the VLAN(s) to your specification.

 
 
© Comcentric Networking Inc., Box 220, 60 Queen Street, Ripley, Ontario  N0G 2R0