Routers, switches, firewalls, wireless APs and controllers, load balancers, VPN concentrators, optical transceivers, UPS systems, and rack equipment — how engineers actually select, size, and redundantly deploy each one.
Every hardware decision in an enterprise network is really a tradeoff between throughput, feature set, and failure blast radius. This module walks through the internal architecture and selection criteria for every major device class an enterprise network engineer specs — from why Layer 3 switches, not routers, dominate the LAN core, to why a mismatched fiber transceiver is one of the most common avoidable Layer 1 failures in the field.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain, for any device class covered here, what actually fails in practice and how N+1 or 2N redundancy is designed around that failure mode — a pattern this program's five real-project modules apply repeatedly to full building and campus designs.