What is Network Redundancy in Computer Networking?

The redundant paths implemented on a network enable the transmission of the data packet over another alternative cable in the event of the failure of a cable used for data transmission.

What is Network Redundancy?

A sizeable corporate network is always required to provide continuity. By ensuring network success in a large corporation, it means that the institution can always serve its customers. If a corporate network is not well designed, it will face constant faults.

Not serving an enterprise network will result in loss of customers, commercial loss, and loss of customer credibility.

Failure of a single connection on a network or a single connection point on a Switch will result in a disconnected network. Therefore, multiple ports must be configured on the Switch or Routing gateway to ensure continuous network performance.

Multiple configured ports will significantly increase the wiring requirement because various paths leading to a destination will be created. Although the wiring requirement causes huge costs, backup is always required.

For example, let’s consider a network where web servers are hosted. This network is certainly not a service feature. If a company owns a website on these servers, the website must always be active. The agency that provides this service should optimize customer service. Otherwise, a bad service will lead to customer losses.

Advantages of a Redundant Network

It has some essential advantages. These;

1. It reduces congestion on the network.
2. It increases The availability of the network.
3. It provides large load balancing on the network.

While it is of great importance to create redundant routes on the network, there are some disadvantages as well. Switches interconnected in a network can form a loop. If broadcast traffic is broadcast continuously in one direction on the network, this will cause a broadcast storm on the network.

When the broadcast storm occurs, the bandwidth on the network will be used in a large proportion. With this problem, many mistakes on the network will come into play.

In addition, single broadcast frames, multiple frame transmissions, and MAC table creation issues will arise. If a source computer does not know the target computer’s MAC address, the source computer will send a Broadcast (ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) to the network environment and the target computer will want to learn.

Because the Switch that receives the Broadcast on a backed-up network will send the Broadcast from each port, the target computer will respond to two or more broadcasts, resulting in significant network traffic and MAC database bottlenecks.

The only way to prevent such problems is to configure the STP Protocol on the Switches. With STP, you can turn off a backup connection, and if the other connection fails, the disabled connection will be automatically enabled.

As a result, the loop on the network will be prevented by STP.

Example Network Topology;

Final Word

Network redundancy is strongly recommended for the continuous delivery of data transmission. The networking design of large institutions provides continuity and good service. It eliminates customer dissatisfaction or network disruption issues, even if it dramatically impacts costs.