Network Design Principles

CP3397 Network Design and Security Lecture 2

Contents
Design goals Design choices Design approaches The design process Capacity planning

Design goals
Good designs should:

Deliver services requested by users Deliver acceptable throughput and response times Be within budget and maximise cost efficiencies Be reliable Be expandable without major redesign Be manageable by maintenance and support staff Be well documented

Design Choices
Balance of distribution Level of transparency Security Connectivity technology

Design approaches
Two typical methods

Traditional analytic design Building block approach

Both use a similar iterative approach

The traditional design process

Agree requirements Information gathering

Design process

Meets constraints? No
Yes

Deployment

Commissioning

Modify

Design Stages - Agree requirements

Engage end users Translate requirements

Business objectives > technical specification Right level of detail at each design stage

Phasing the requirements

Designing the requirements

Design Stages - Designing the requirements

Aim for completeness Prioritise with a hierarchical system such as
[M] - Mandatory
[H] Highly desirable [D] - Desirable

[N] - Note

Design Stages - Assessing requirements

Consider all aspects

E.g. support & maintenance, depreciation, commissioning costs, project management fees, h/w & s/w upgrade costs, b/w/ costs, consultancy charges over the lifetime of the network M=100, H=10, D=1, N=0 Produce scores and rank suppliers

Weighted matrix multipliers

Design Stages - Information gathering

Need to find details of user behaviour, application use and location information for example:

User: location, numbers, services used, typical access Sites: number, location, constraints on traffic (security, political or cost) Servers and services: location, level of distribution WAN/backbone predicted link traffic Protocol support: bridged, routed or switched Gateways needed? Legacy support: equipment, protocols or services Specific availability needs? 24-hour/backup links etc Five-year plan changes to population or business requirements Budgetary constraints Greenfield or existing site

Information is refined and leads to a requirements database and capacity plan

Design Stages - Site constraints

Greenfield or

Greenfield sites have no legacy constraints but It is difficult to determine the real network loads and stresses Needs more detail of application use and underlying protocols Could use simulation to predict performance Limited access Access to live network could be restricted but Bottlenecks more obvious Can use traffic/network analysis tools

Existing site

Design Stages - Planning

Uses information on

Hosts, users, services, and their internetworking needs Conceptual design Analysis Refinement Brainstorming, design reviews, modelling tools

Iterative process of

Involving

Leading to final draft design

Design Stages - Design specification

Detailed document of the design

Acts as a benchmark for design changes Final design choices and changes need justification and documenting Should include change history to aid maintenance Used for the implementation

Design Stages Implementation

Needs a project plan to include

Phased introduction of new technology Educating the users (what to expect) Pilot installation (test for possible problems) Acceptance testing (to prove performance meets requirements) Deployment (provide support on going live and provide fallback position)

Connectivity options
Technology choices

LANs (Ethernet, Token ring, ATM) MANs (FDDI, SMDS, ATM, SONET/SDH) WANS (Frame relay, ATM, ISDN, X.25, PDCs, Satellite) Wireless (802.11, Bluetooth, GPRS, GSM) Dial-up lines Serial links

Connectivity option determinants

Packet, cell or circuit switching Wired or wireless Distance Performance Bandwidth Quality of Service Availability

Media and bandwidth choices

Capacity Planning - Outline

Concerned with

User response times Application behaviour and performance characteristics Network utilisation Minimise downtime Maximise service to customers Minimise costs of procurement and maintenance Avoid unscheduled maintenance or re-design Avoid costly upgrades and bad publicity

Needed to

Capacity Planning - Stages

Form a discussion group (involve users etc.) Quantify user behaviour Quantify Application behaviour Baseline existing network

Traffic profiles

Make traffic projections Summarize input data for design process Assess other data (environmental, location restrictions, deployment constraints etc)

Capacity Planning Step 1

Form a discussion group (involve users etc.)

Needs wide representation Users, network managers, application groups What uses find acceptable and unacceptable Map of services and users and details of user behaviour User and service sizing data Snapshots from data capture and network management tools Traces of key services using protocol analysers Pilot network implementation

To elicit

Quantify items using

Capacity Planning Step 2

Quantify user behaviour

Need to know population and and location of users Summary of major user groups Application use by user group Site location data (country, grid ref., town, postcode, telephone exchange) Planned changes

Capacity Planning Step 3

Quantify Application behaviour

Need to identify
Applications that could affect performance Location and performance of servers and clients Key constraints on performance (response times, buffer sizes

etc

And define

Application behaviour under fault conditions (lost data) Addressing mechanisms( broad/multi/unicast) Packet characteristics (frame sizes and direction) Routable and non-routable services (IP, NETBIOS)

Undefined applications allow choice of distribution balance

Capacity Planning Step 4

Baseline existing network

Baselining a behavioural profile of the network obtained from

Packet traces, transaction rates, event logs and stats Router ACLs, firewall rulebases Inventory of H/W and S/W revisions

Traffic profiles -Capture data for a stable working network with details of

B/w utilization by packet type and protocol Packet/frame size distribution Background error rates Collision rates

Various tools can be used

Network and protocol analysers, SNMP data, RMON probes, OS tools, traceroute, ping etc

Capacity Planning Step 5

Make traffic projections using some, or all of:

Hand calculation Commercial analytical tools to project network utilisation Simulation tools (most detail)

Capacity Planning Step 6

Summarize input data for design process

Budget Database of sites, user populations, List of key applications and their behaviour Traffic matrix Static or dynamic bandwidth allocation Max. Delay and Max. hops between sites Resilience, Availability, degree of meshing Design constraints and trade-off
(e.g. delay v cost)

Need to consider

The building-block design process

(an alternative)

Needs Analysis

Technology design

Cost Assessment

Summary
Good design

Is an iterative process of continuous refinement Is logical and consistent Should deliver acceptable performance and cost metrics (trade-off) Is more than choosing the technology!