Network Design and Implementation, whether it’s for a new building, new project or just a revamp of an existing outdated infrastructure that is beginning to fail. There are several important considerations in designing a network, we are usually trying to give you the most speed and longevity to give you some future proofing with a great ROI.

As your company grows its business, your network will need some updating to expand and accommodate additional users and workloads. Many vendors provide products that allow us to implement robust network elements that would have been cost-prohibitive in the recent past. This allows modern network design to move from component selection and configuration to focusing on solving your business problems.

The essential goals of network design include:

 

Problem Identification – the most important consideration in a network design project is identifying your business challenges. Network Design is less about what switches and NIC’s we use and more about meeting your technology goals and business objectives.
What are you trying to accomplish through the use of technology? Determining the business goal often requires a detailed understanding of the network services you want to offer to your end users, business partners, customers and vendors.

Unified Communications Support – Recognizing the importance of a distributed and mobile workforce needs to be a fundamental component of network design. Mobile technology allows users to access data any time from any place on any device. A unified communications strategy, is essential for your company.

Security Requirements – Security comes in many forms including regulatory compliance, protection or at least a continuity plan for new viruses such as ransomware, user protection against accidental intrusions and purposeful IP transfer. Security imposes restrictions on things, so we must first understand your company’s business needs before we decide on a security strategy. Security now allows for more granular control over company assets and property.

Cloud Computing – Cloud based services are evolving quickly, most of our clients are still best served with a hybrid infrastructure, some local services such as network authentication, printing, internet access, faxing, and file archiving are still much faster and cost effective at the local level. However, most companies have several web based applications they work with, physicians need to work with insurance companies and hospitals; many industries need to deal with multiple insurance companies or a line of business application. We use several ourselves, such as our ticketing system and our remote monitoring and access programs. Factoring these added needs for internet speed and redundancy are important design considerations.

Network Components – The basic elements haven’t changed much recently. However, these components continue to get better faster and stronger. Our firewalls and desktop anti-virus protection work together, wireless networking is getting much faster, pcs and tablets are getting smaller, faster and more mobile. Digitizers allow us to more effectively use pens on touch screens. PoE or Power over Ethernet allows us to put devices on the network without external power. Security camera’s, telephones and wireless access points can use this, simplifying the need to run power everywhere.

Impact of Virtualization – Virtualization increases utilization and allows workloads to be moved seamlessly without regard for the underlying physical hardware. This increases network complexity but increases productivity, reduces costs and improves system availability by reducing the need to completely rebuild servers. Picking the right software/hardware combination for your servers, storage, desktops and network equipment are important to your design considerations.

Bandwidth, your Need for Speed – Virtualization adds to network bandwidth demands, particularly when data or workloads are migrated between systems, backups, snapshots, disaster recovery, VoIP, iSCSI, and streaming media servers, which all impact LAN performance. Network performance is and will always be an ongoing battle. Organizations need to constantly monitor and analyze traffic patterns and application/data footprints to ensure the best balance.

Our remote monitoring tools, keep an eye on network traffic, CPU utilization and hard drive utilization, temperatures, and traffic so we can keep your network running as efficiently as possible.

If you have questions about your current network infrastructure or have some changes in mind, call us and we’ll help you design the right environment for your company.