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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 (for example one
in Delhi and another in Bombay ) 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:
- a list of network services that will be provided
such as FTP, Web, e-mail, etc.
- Who will be administering the security of these
services
- How the people be trained on security policies
and procedures
- Recovery plan, in case a security breach does take
place.
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 labour cost. Therefore
more weightage is given to reliable equipment, and efficient
utilization of bandwidth. Some factors that influence
cost are:
- Improve efficiency on WAN circuits by using features
such as compression, Voice Activity Detection etc.
- Use technologies such as ATM that dynamically allocate
WAN bandwidth.
- Integrate both voice and data circuits
- Optimize or eliminate under utilized circuits.
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