How is a network made scalable?

[Kondratiev]

I'm looking for information about how networks are made scalable but am having trouble finding information online.

What I'm curious about is this: say a network is used by an organisation, such as a hotel. Normally about 50% of the hotel's rooms are occupied, but on key dates occupancy reaches around 100%.

What kind of scalability mechanisms should be proposed for the organisation to cope with this issue?

I would appreciate any help people can offer to answer this question or any further reading people could provide on this subject.

[zmbd]

I am not a networking person; however, your example makes no sense to me. I understand that this is an example; however, people are going to respond to your post based on that example. I think the most obvious reply will be, "does that IT-Team still have a job after designing a network that only handles less than 50% of the peak performance requirements." };-)

I know that when we expanded operations at my facility, there were some questions asked at the meetings I was able to attend. From the notes I have from the first meetings a few things were talked about:
+ Bandwidth and application needs
+ Legacy connectivity options (we have 20 year old networking in some areas)
+ Moving current standalone systems to the network (using internal VOIP with the current telephone PABX systems, fire and security networks, etc..)
+ Security for bring-your-own-device
+ Network management schemas.
+ and a few more items that I think are specific to our infrastructure.

Hopefully, this will get the thought processes going for you and attract the attention of one of the networking Gurus

Best Regards
-Z

[RonB]

Your example is really targeted to a question regarding hotel staffing, not networking.

Hotel occupancies below 100% are not factored in when dealing with scalability. The network should be designed for a minimum of 100% occupancy as its base and scale up from there.

This is clearly a class homework assignment so I don't want to go into too many details, but here are a few things to consider.

Are the rooms being provided with wired or wireless connections or both?

What type of backbone i.e., 100Mb or 1GB?

How many and what type of AP's are being used i.e. what is their connection and speed/bandwidth capacity?

What type of internet connection is being used i.e. T1, DSL, cable, etc? Do they have have multiple connections to allow for failover or load balancing?

How are they providing DHCP? Do they have redundant servers?

[ScottishKing]

There are really advanced, cutting edge solutions to make network processing scaleable, i.e only use x amount of CPUs or x amount of memeory - only whats needed. That's for super-advanced big networks though.

The physical layer isn't scaleable though, if you need a cable to each hotel room, you need a cable to each hotel room. Now, if that cable supports a phone AND a pc chained together on different vlans then you have saved yourself from running two separate cables.