I got my CCNP certification library the other day to finally get myself another cert, so I’ve been doing some reading of late. The thing I hate about certs is that, even if you have all the experience in the world, there’s always a whole mess of academic stuff that no one really knows or cares about. One of those things is the Cisco Network Hierarchical Model. This model is purely academic and comes with the caveat that you may or may not want to need to use this model in your situation. In other words, here’s what we recommend, but do what you want to make your network run properly.