Network planning and design is an iterative process, encompassing topological (integrated) design, network-synthesis, and network-realisation, and is aimed at ensuring that a new telecommunications and computer network or service meets the needs of the subscriber and operator. Sorry, we simply couldn’t avoid the jargon there!

Computers and information networks are critical to the success of businesses, both large and small. They connect people, support applications and services, and provide access to the resources that keep your business running. To meet the daily requirements of businesses, networks themselves are becoming quite complex.

Our Design Philosophy
TCCB take a structured approach to designing your network. Before we start we verify the business goals and technical requirements. This is critical as it gives a vision of what the needs of the business are in 1, 3 and even 5 years’ time.

Determining The Scope Of The Project
While gathering requirements, we identify the issues that will affect the entire network and those that affect only specific portions. By creating an integration map we can isolate areas of concern and identify the scope of the project, thereby preventing failure to understand the impact of a particular requirement.

This can often cause a project scope to expand beyond the original estimate and such oversights can greatly increase the cost and time required to implement the new design. TCCB circumvents this common issue that results in serious cost and time escalation with our network planning and design process.

As an example some of the following questions will be explored:

• What will be the benefits of a hierarchal network design?
• What design methodology was used by previous network design?
• What are the design considerations for the core, distribution, and access layers?
• What are the design considerations for the network enterprise edge?
• What are the design considerations that must be met to support remote workers?
• What are the design considerations for supporting enterprise wireless and/or data centre/server farms?

We will then determine the features and functions required to meet the needs identified in the first step. This is followed by a network-readiness assessment. Once the network readiness has been completed, we would have identified areas of soft and hardware challenges as well as potential impacts upon people, systems and more importantly risks to the business. With this in mind, we can structure our designs around scalability, meaning a re-design is not required when things change.

Next, a design solution along with acceptance test plan is created. We will consider aspects such as:

• Scalability
• Availability
• Security
• Manageability

To meet the four fundamental design goals, a network must be built on an architecture that allows for both flexibility and growth.

In networking, a hierarchical design is used to group devices into multiple networks. The networks are organized in a layered approach. The hierarchical design model has three basic layers:

• Core layer: Connects distribution layer devices
• Distribution layer: Interconnects the smaller local networks
• Access layer: Provides connectivity for network hosts and end devices

Hierarchical networks have advantages over flat network designs. The benefit of dividing a flat network into smaller, more manageable hierarchical blocks is that local traffic remains local. Only traffic destined for other networks is moved to a higher layer.

Where Modular Design of Enterprise Architectures may apply. Enterprise Architectures can be used to further divide the three-layer hierarchical design into modular areas. The modules represent areas that have different physical or logical connectivity. They designate where different functions occur in the network. This modularity enables flexibility in network design. It facilitates implementation and troubleshooting. Three areas of focus in modular network design we may need to examine are; Enterprise structure, Server farm structure and Enterprise Edge.