Network Design & Management

MaHa SaLamat 0040-BS-IT-2016 BSIT-8

Role of Scalability and Availability while Analyzing
Technical Goals of a Network
For achieving technical goals of a network, we analyze some components of a network
which are scalability, availability, performance and security. We analyze technical goals of a
customer as well as we analyze the technologies by ourselves for recommending the best
technical solution for the network. Role of scalability and availability while analyzing technical
goals of a network is quite important. Details about them is as following:

1. Scalability:
Scalability means how much growth a network design should support. Scalability is a
primary goal for a large number of enterprise companies. Enterprise companies add users,
applications, additional sites, and external network connections faster. The proposed network
design should be able to adapt consistent growth in network usage and scope of the work.
Network scalability may include the following:
 Planning for Expansion:
Planning for expansion helps your customer understand how much the network
will expand next year or in more years. We should ask to the customer to analyze goals
for next 5 years but most companies don't have a clear vision at all. You can ask a list of
questions to analyze your customer's short term goals. Questions are as following:      
o How many sites will be added in the next year? Or in next 2 years?    
o How broad will the networks be on each new site?    
o How many users will be added for using corporate internet in the next year? Or in
next 2 years?      
o How many servers will be added to the network in the next year? Or in next 2
years?
 Expanding Access to Data:
Expanding access to data is all about extending access to the data center. In 1970s
and early 1980s, the data was stored on mainframes. Later, the data was stored on servers
in departmental LANs. And nowadays, the data is store on centralized mainframes and
servers. In 1990’s, networking books and classes were operating according to 80/20 rule.
In which, 80% traffic stays at departmental LANs and 20% stays at other departments.
Implementing intranets which enable employees to access centralized web servers using
IP technologies which breaks the 80/20 rule. If your customer wants to implement an
extranet, which is accessible to outside parties then, you should document this according
to your technical goals. Following are the technical goals for scaling and upgrading
corporate enterprise networks:
o Connect separated departmental LANs into the corporate internetwork.
o Fix LAN/WAN bottleneck problems
o Provide centralized servers that reside in a data center.
o Make mainframe data accessible to the enterprise IP network.

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 Network Design & Management

o Add new sites to support field offices and telecommuters.

o Add new sites and services to support secure communication.
 Constraints on Scalability:
Selecting technologies that can meet a customer’s scalability goals is a complex
process. For example, selecting a flat network topology with Layer 2 switches can cause
problems by scaling of users, especially if the users send large broadcast frames.
Remember that top-down network design is a repetitive process. Scalability goals and
solutions are repeated during many phases of the network design process.

2. Availability:
Availability refers to the amount of time, in which users have access to the network. It
also means how much time the network is on. Availability can be expressed as a percentage
compared to the total time of the year, month, week, day or hour. For example, if a network
offers 24/7 service and the network is up 165 hours in the 168-hour week, then availability
will be 98.21 percent. Availability is associated with redundancy, resiliency, and reliability
which play an important role in increasing availability of a network.
 Disaster Recovery:
Every corporation must plan for overcoming from natural disasters like floods,
fires, or earthquake and also from unnatural disasters such as bombs, terrorist attacks, or
hostage situations. A disaster recovery plan is about keeping data backed up in one or
more places, and switching to backup technologies if main technologies are affected.
 Specifying Availability Requirements:
It is important to specify availability requirements like an uptime of 99.70 percent
and an uptime of 99.95 percent. Availability requirements should be specified with at
least two digits following the decimal point and it also need to be specified as uptime per
year, month, week, day, or hour.
 Five Nines Availability:
Some customers insist for a network uptime of 99.999 percent according to the
business level, which is known as five nines availability. Five nines availability is a
complex and expensive process which is extremely hard to achieve. You should explain
to a network design customer that for achieving it we need redundant equipment, links
and extremely reliable hardware and software.
 The Cost of Downtime:
Specifying a cost of downtime is a method to help you understand the availability
requirements. For each critical application, documenting how much money the company
loses per hour of downtime is important.
 Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time to Repair:
For expressing availability as the percent of uptime, you can define availability as
a mean time between failure and mean time to repair which can be used to calculate
availability goals. MTBF is a term used to specify how long a computer will last before it
fails. MTTR is a term used for how long a computer will take for repairing process.
Reference:

© Department of Computer Science & Information Technology

University of Narowal, Narowal 2
 Network Design & Management

[1] Top-Down Network Design 3rd Edition by Priscilla Oppenheimer

© Department of Computer Science & Information Technology

University of Narowal, Narowal 3