Network Design
There are many factors to consider when
designing a new network.
The following are a few
of these factors that you should be aware of.
Requirements Analysis:
Much of the information obtained during a consultation visit will be used in the network design.
Network Topology:
The design of the network topology is the first step in the logical design phase. Much like an architectual drawing for a building, a topology is a high level blue print of a network.
There are some critical questions that need to be asked by the design department before a network design is undertaken. These questions are key to the successful implementation of your network.
What is your current network configuration, and why do you want to change it?
Knowing what kind of applications you will be using on your network helps determine what speeds and other qualities you will need in the network. You may not know the exact amount of bandwidth you need, or other features, but bandwidth is usually the overridding one.
What Service Level Agreement (SLA) on your network is acceptable?
A service-level agreement determines how much network downtime is acceptable. SLA is an important factor in network design decisions.
Everyone would like a network that was up 100% of the time, but no one can really afford that. A network that's up 99% of the time is fairly easy to achieve -- that's 15 minutes of downtime each day or a small blip of an outage every hour and a half. So it's important to set expectations that no network is perfect, but there are certain things that you can do to improve uptime.
What networking skills does your in-house IT staff have?
Determining the technical skills of your in-house IT staff is another important consideration in the design phase of your network. What technical level of involvement will you want after the installation is completed?
If your staff is highly technical you may only require a minimum amount of assistance designing and specifying the details of the network, and then administer the network after that. Will you need project management help, or coordinating all the vendors and making sure everything gets done?
If your staff is just somewhat technical, perhaps the can handle the Moves, Adds, or Changes (MAC) requests, but are not technical enough to configure new VLANs or add new connections to new buildings.
Maybe you have no staff with technical abilities and need a fully managed solution.
Often some kind of hybrid implementation is the solution where you utilize both your staff to support some aspects of the network while calling for a more managed solution for the higher technology challenging aspects of the network.
What is your IT budget for the network design project?
Your IT budget is an extremely important factor to consider when designing your network. Your network designer needs to know and not for reasons of greed or commision, but because it's about setting expectations . There are certain design patterns that fit different budgets and your budget really needs to be in sync with your expectations.
Once these questions and other factors are considered and answered the designer can start designing your network.