A network is a communications system which ties two or more computing systems together for the purpose of exchanging data including digital voice, video, audio. The term “network” is used quite broadly to indicate anything from the Internet, a global super-internetwork, down to the the Local Area Network (LAN) at your workplace, school, coffee shop, or home. There are home networks, business networks, telephone and cellular system networks, satellite communications networks and even an interplanetary network operated by NASA.
Networks were created to share network resources, such as printers, and later, to share information between computer systems. At first, Xerox developed a technology they called Ethernet, a simple communications system built to attach two computers together with a Xerox printer to allow them to share the printer. Later, more complex communications systems were created to connect multiple computers over greater and greater distances. Better software and hardware techniques were developed over time to make networks more reliable and easier to set up and manage. At each stage in the development of networks, specific communications and utilization problems had to be identified and resolved along with compatibility issues between devices, networks and network equipment. Finally, along came the Internet where computers on different networks could be made to communicate with each other without being directly connected using Internet Protocol’s packet based communications. The solution to making networks inter-operable, and to make networks scale up to ever larger numbers of computers and users, was to break down the various aspects of communications and network management into separate, independent functions. Today, networks perform all these functions transparently to the communications taking place over them, and all of this technology is mostly invisible to us.
From a Cisco perspective, a network is one group of computing resources that are connected to the same set of physical network equipment and which use a single set of logical addresses that are under the control of a single administrative authority. Ethernet networks are the most common example of a network, sometimes called a local area network.
An Internetwork is a network composed of multiple networks, connected by routing devices that learn routes and forward packets between networks and may, or may not be under a single administrative authority. Internetworks are built from smaller networks. The best example of an internetwork is the Internet, which is a collection of hundreds of smaller internetworks and networks. The internetworks you will deal with as a Cisco engineer are internetworks you will manage and maintain. You will be the administrative authority for that internetwork. To administrate an internetwork, you will need to learn about switching, routing and access controls, all of which you can learn here at InetDaemon.com.
InetDaemon.Com has a full set of tutorials on Local Area Networks and Networking
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