Subnetted Network

From my studies and experience I would recommend that you not only stay with your subnetts but consider making them smaller. The best idea is to create subnets based on business operational needs. the less machines on a subnet the less traffic it handles the faster it works.

If you have a subnet for marketting different to the one for accounting and another for management, etc you get better performance out of each subnet and out of the network overall. It is best to use routers to connect the subnets and to use switches instead of hubs within the subnets. Again this is done to minimise unwanted traffic within segments. The class of each subnet it not all that relevant as long as you have the routers properly set up.

Another advantage of segmented networks is that hardware faults within one subnet do not interfere with the operation of the other subnet segments.

If you remove the routers and create one huge network you should see a degredation in network performance.

The only way I see you ablt to pull off going to a class B is if you're using all private IP addresses inside your firewall... You could go to one Class B prive address, and then recreate your subnets, but this seems hardly worth the time since you're running the right way already. The right way, meaning you have routers, segments, switches, etc... Remember, that with 1000 hosts, you will still need routers to break up broadcast domains in your network, so removing the routers is not an option.

In order to change all this around, the only convenient reason I see for you to do all that would be only if you replaced all your routers with real layer 3 devices, meaning Cisco routers. NT boxes don't provide as much security as a router anyway.

Whatever you do, do not remove routers from your topology, it's the most important thing you can do to make sure it stays running in a somewhat organized fashion.

They're right. Keep your subnets and get a real router to connect them.

If you're talking about 1000 nodes, I think it is fair to assume that your organization has remote sites as well. If so, you might want to create a router solution that willcover both LAN and WAN.

Another solution might be VLAN with a router on a core switch routing between the VLANs. This is fairly complex to specify and implement, but will provide scalability in reassignment of VLANs in support of business reorganizations.