How to Approach Your Network (Re)Design Project

Does your network diagram look like a plate of spaghetti? Do you even have a network diagram? In many businesses, networks grow haphazardly. First two devices get connected, then two more, then more, and eventually, it creates an unmanageable tangle of cables. If you haven’t rethought your network design in a while, now is a good time to take a step back and see if you can straighten out that mess.

The first question to ask is, what infrastructure do you already have? This means pulling out any existing documentation to identify servers, switches, routers, and other connected devices. If you don’t have documentation, you may need to crawl around in the computer room and trace cable routes to see how things are currently working.

Next, ask what demands your network needs to support. This means identifying the applications your users work with and the bandwidth those applications require. Your network likely needs to accommodate file servers and print servers along with database servers and application servers. Think about upcoming changes that will impact your network, such as adding new employees, new worksites, new applications, or new technologies. Collecting all this data will take some time and may require surveying users, talking to managers, or collecting and analyzing network statistics.

Besides the types of services your network supports, you also need to consider where those services will be accessed from, whether locally or remotely, and whether some services need higher levels of security than others. Determine how much downtime is acceptable to identify how much redundancy is required. You should also prioritize all the various demands on your network in order to be able to evaluate potential design solutions.

More information about : network levels

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