ocated on a floor- by-floor basis. Wiring is usually run from points on the floor to a central location on the same floor. Floors are usually interconnected with conduits that run between floors. When a company occupies multiple floors, the wiring of each floor lends itself to a collapsed-core design because there are limited wiring possibilities between floors. Because the amount of space on each floor is limited, there is typically little need for more than two physical network layers. With the core switches on one floor, and access switches on the remaining floors, the access switches can act as distribution- layer switches as well. Port density is usually not an issue, as each floor does not Chapter 33: Designing Networks Server Farms-Where Do They Belong? Do servers belong near the users that they serve, or in a farm near the core? Where servers belong in your network depends on how your network is designed, and often on the type of server in question. Some servers should be in the core. Centrally locating email serv- ers, for instance, makes sense. Other servers should be closer to the users they serve. For example, in a campus network, it would not make sense to put accounting servers in the core if the entire accounting department were located in one building. Then again, there may not be space in each building for servers. A lot depends on the layout of your network, too. Many companies these days are building completely flat networks, with the core/distribution/access model being com- pletely collapsed into a single pair of large switches, such as Cisco 6509s. In this case, everything is connected to the same switches, making the argument moot. occupy much physical space. From a logical standpoint, the distribution layer may be collapsed into the core as well. You may not even need a logical distribution layer at all. Again, each environment is different. Another scenario I've seen that lends itself to this type of design is the segmented building. One project I worked on involved redesigning the networ