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Design & Planning of
your Network
Network
planning consists of the following steps:
1. Identifying the applications that you intend to use:
Computer networking may be required diverse environments such as
Enterprise Resource Management (ERM), Internet telephony,
Instant Messaging (IM), eMail and others. It is important to
discuss the applications that you intend to use such as the
above. These in turn are used for estimating the software,
hardware, and traffic requirements.
2. Traffic Requirements:
Computing traffic requirements include several factors. A few
point to consider include-
•
Identification
and documentation of major traffic sources.
•
Categorization
of traffic as local, distributed, client/server, peer-
to-peer,
terminal/host or server/server.
•
Estimation of
bandwidth requirements for each application.
•
Quality of
Service (QoS) requirements for each application
•
Reliability
requirements.
3. Scalability Requirements:
Scalability refers to the extent of network growth that should
be supported. For corporation, scalability is a major
consideration. Provision must be made to add users,
applications, additional sites, and external network
connections.
4. Geographical considerations:
Consider the LAN and WAN links that may be required. Offices
that are separated by large distance can be linked together by a
WAN (Wide Area Network) link. Similarly, building complexes with
a compound can be linked by a LAN (Local Area Network) link.
Typically, the LAN links are high band width (100Mbps) and WAN
links are of lower bandwidth (64 Kbps - 2Mbps). Further, the
LANs fall within the premises of a Company whereas WANs are
typically leased and maintained by the Telecom. Hence, WANs are
costly in bandwidth terms and need to be planned and designed
with utmost care to minimize resource consumption.
5. Availability:
The availability of a network need to be given careful
consideration while designing a network. It is the amount of
time a network is available to users over a period of time and
is often a critical design parameter. Availability has direct
relation with amount of redundancy required. Another important
factor that needs to be considered when computing availability
requirements is the business loss to the Company due to
unavailability of the network for a given amount of time. A
right balance needs to be arrived at such that the profitability
is maintained.
6. Security and Accessibility:
Security and accessibility are among the important design phase
steps. A security plan needs to be devised that meets the
required security specifications. You must specify the network
services that will be provided such as FTP, Web, e-mail, etc.
7. Cost considerations:
For LANs, the tendency is to minimize the equipment cost. That
is minimizing the cable cost, minimizing the per port cost, and
the labour cost. For WANs the primary goal is to maximize the
usage of the bandwidth. This is because, the recurring costs for
bandwidth are normally much higher than the equipment or labor
cost. Therefore more weight is given to reliable equipment, and
efficient utilization of bandwidth. Some factors that influence
cost are:
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508-771-6744
508-771-6499
info@alliedsystemstech.com
