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Network management Toolkit

Managing your network for corporate growth

Deb Shinder Tech Republic

Published: 05 Oct 2005 11:35 BST

Most large companies start out as small companies — even the mighty Microsoft began as a two-person operation. Getting from here to there requires time, effort, planning and a little luck. Some businesses focus their planning on how to grow the company, without planning for how essential components — the people, the physical facilities, the network — will handle that growth.

That's how companies end up with a bunch of employees in positions that don’t necessarily suit them, a hodgepodge of offices and warehouses that aren’t ideal for their needs, and/or a collection of workstations, servers and network devices in a configuration that "just grew that way".

A strategic growth plan will help you to avoid all of the above, but we’re only going to address developing a strategic growth plan for your network. Realise, though, that all of these elements are tied together; personnel issues impact network requirements, and the physical configuration of your offices will affect the topology of your network. As with any plan, to be effective the planning must be done before your growth spurt begins.

Assessing the present to predict the future
The trick to planning for your network’s growth is to be able to predict the future. Unfortunately, no one can do that with complete accuracy. However, you can make educated estimations of how your company — and its network — will grow by assessing its present position in the market, growth trends to date, and industry-wide trends.

Growth potential should be assessed in regard to the following areas:

Bandwidth requirements.
Disk/Storage capacity requirements.
Network segmentation requirements (based on performance and security requirements).
Security requirements.
Management/administrative requirements.
Availability requirements.

Assessing bandwidth and storage capacity requirements
Future bandwidth requirements can be estimated based on the following:

Increases in number of personnel. The more people you have using the network simultaneously, the more network bandwidth will be required to support them.
Enhanced productivity. As existing personnel become more efficient and more experienced and thus able to turn out more work in less time, bandwidth needs may increase to handle the increased work product being stored on and transferred across the network.
New, more sophisticated network applications. As your company grows, the need for high bandwidth applications such as video conferencing will become more likely.
Geographic expansion. As the company expands to multiple geographic locations, bandwidth capacity must support communications with distant sites.

Except for the last, geographic expansion, all of these same factors will affect future disk/storage capacity requirements. More personnel, enhanced productivity and more...

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