Network Design Process

In Network design, Getting exactly right(Designing) at the first time is nearly impossible, even
with the best design tools and resources available. This is because every network has different
demands placed on it and new demands will be placed on the network over time. To Design
network is to do a good job of estimating needs, and then do the best job possible to create a
design to meet those needs. Having fallback plans is also important, in case some part of the
network doesn’t perform the way you intended. The point is that network design is a process,
often an iterative one. Your job as a network designer is to get as close as possible to the needed
design.
Assessing Network Needs
 Initially you have to know what the network needs to accomplish rather then think about any
specifics—network topology; network operating system (NOS) platform; a structure for
hubs, bridges, and routers; or the grade of wiring.
 assessing needs is where you should place the most emphasis during a design process.
Failing to do so almost certainly will result in a network that isn’t productive for its users.
When assessing needs, you are trying to come up with detailed answers to the
following questions:
 How much storage space is required?
 How much bandwidth is required?
 What network services are required?
 What is the budget for the project?
These basic questions are fairly easy to answer as a whole, but you need to break
them down further to make sure no holes in the network design could lead to problems.
For example, it might be easy to determine that the network must be able to support up to 100
Mbps of bandwidth, but you need to know how, when, and where that bandwidth is used. If the
accounting department is using 90 percent of the bandwidth when communicating to the
accounting server. then naturally you want to put the accounting system’s server and its users on
their own network segment.
1. Applications
A good place to start with a network design is to list and understand the applications that will run
on the network. Ultimately, a network’s main purpose is to help people in accessing certain
applications, and people do their work most directly through the application software they use. If
the applications don’t work right, then the users won’t work right.
Most networks have both common applications and department- and user-specific
applications.
Most companies usually meet the common application needs through a suite of desktop
applications, such as Microsoft Office or Lotus SmartSuite.
A) Common Applications
The following is a list of applications that most companies install for all users :
 Word processor
 E-mail
 Personal information manager (calendar, contact list, and so forth)
 Virus-scanning software
What matters most for a network performance is the other applications,their expected size,
frequency of creation, and long-term storage requirements.
After determining the common applications, move on to department-specific
applications.
B) Departmental Applications
Departmental Applications means applications that runs on department level only.
Different departmental applications can have wildly different impacts on the network.
Following are common departmental applications you should consider:
 Accounting
 Distribution and inventory control
 Manufacturing/material requirements planning (MRP)
 Information technology
 Electronic commerce
 Human resources
For each of the departmental applications you identify, you need to ask several
questions: How much storage will they consume? From where will the applications
be run ? Will they have their own dedicated servers? How much network bandwidth will
the application need? How will all these factors change as the company grows?
C) User Specific Applications
user-specific applications means unknown applications requested by users to install for there
personal use or professional use.
If you decide that user-specific applications will have a significant impact on the network, then
you should estimate their needs, just as you have for the other types of applications.

2) Users
 Once you know the applications that the network must support, you can estimate how many
users need to be supported and which applications each user will use.
 Estimating total users will likely be easier because the company should already have Details
of their users. Your user estimates should be proper because number of users in each
department in the company will increase with the time.
 You should estimate how many users will need to be supported immediately, in one year and
in near future.
 Knowing the number of users isn’t enough, though. You need to know more about the users.
At a minimum, consider the following questions to determine if any of the following will be
important factors for the users:
A) Bandwidth requirements
 bandwidth is always required to save and retrieve files, send and receive e-mail, and perform
an average amount of browsing on the Internet still we need to know that is there any users
need significant amounts of bandwidth?
 For example, will user download a copy of the software from the Internet once a week? Will
groups of users need to exchange large quantities of data among different sites? Will any
users be running videoconferencing software over your network connection? How much web
browsing do you expect the network’s users to do? Will people be sending large e-mail
 attachments frequently?
B) Storage requirements
Admin needs to know that how much storage is required for users? , Will any group of users need
significantly more storage capacity than the overall average you already determined? If so, how
many people need access to that data? So that admin can easily identify the storage requirements.
C) Service requirements
Will any groups of users require additional network services not needed by most users?
When examining user bandwidth requirements, remember to look at the timeliness of the
bandwidth needs. If certain known activities require a lot of bandwidth and must be carried out
during the normal workday, that high-bandwidth use might interfere with the performance of the
rest of the network. Therefore, make sure to estimate both average and peak bandwidth needs.
3) Network Services
Next, the services that the network must provide. These can vary widely in different companies.
A very basic network might need only file and print services, plus perhaps Internet connectivity.
A more complex network will need many additional services. Consider which of the following
types of services the network will need to provide:
 File and print services
 Backup and restore services
 Internet web browsing
 FTP and Telnet
 Internet or external e-mail
 Internet security services
 Remote access to the LAN through a VPN or a modem pool
 Fax into the LAN (manually distributed or automatically distributed)
 Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services
 Centralized virus-protection services
 Wide area network (WAN) services to other locations
 Streaming Internet radio and other media
 Voice over IP (VoIP)
For each service, you must answer a number of questions.
First, the storage and bandwidth requirements for each service, and any other impacts they might
have.
Second, how the service is to be provided. Usually, this means that which server will host the
service.
E.G. A DHCP server, which requires minimal resources, is a good example of such a service. On
the other hand, an e-mail system might require such high resources that you must plan to host it
on its own dedicated server.
Third, what users or groups of users need which services . This is because, to minimize backbone
traffic.

4) Security and Safety

Security and safety concern the company’s need to keep information secure—both inside and
outside an organization—and to keep the company’s data safe
from loss.
For both these considerations, a trade-off exists between cost and effectiveness. As
mentioned, no network is ever totally secure and no data is ever totally safe from loss.
Some applications might be perfectly well suited to keeping their data on a striped
RAID 0 array of disks, where the risk of loss is high (relative to other RAID levels, because the
data might be static and easy to restore from tape if the disk array is lost).
Other applications might require the highest level of data-loss safety possible, with
failover servers each having mirrored RAID 1 or RAID 10 arrays and online tape
backup systems updating a backup tape every hour or for every transaction.
Similarly, some companies might work with data that is so sensitive that they must install the best
firewalls, perhaps even two levels of firewalls, and hire full-time professionals dedicated to
keeping the data secure. Other companies might be satisfied if they are only reasonably secure.
5) Growth and Capacity Planning
The final area to consider is the expected growth of the network. A network designed for a
rapidly growing company looks different from one for a slowly growing company, even if both
companies start out at the same size.
In the First case, design that admin can quickly and easily expand without needing to replace
much of the existing hardware and software.
In the Second case, you can get by with a simpler network design.
Consider the impact of growth on the different parts of the network that have
already examined (applications, users, and services), because linear growth does not
always mean a matching linear impact to the network.
Growth Regarding to Bandwidth, means if an organisation needs 4-5 mbps speed admin can set a
scope of 1-2 mbps extra for near future use.
Similarly for storage if 500 GB is needed then admin can be prepared himself for purchasing 1
TB of data.