Category:Design and Architecture
Now that I have a little free time I decided to make a brief sketch of questions aimed to define the requirements for network equipment. The following chunk of questions mostly refers to switches.
Questions:
- What is the estimate project budget?
- Are there any requirements to vendor choice?
- What resource-intensive services and applications (like video streaming, etc.) are used and will likely to be used in the network?
- Is PoE capable equipment used in the network?
- Is yes, then how many ports (%) are used at the moment?
- If no, are there any plans to acquire it in the near future?
- What connection speed does current network equipment provide to end users?
- How many access layer switches are used in the network at the moment?
- What is the vendor and type of switches used in the network?
- What type of switches is used in the network core at the moment?
- What types of links is used between access layer switches and the core?
- Is traffic analysis required? If yes, then in what section of the network and what kind of traffic?
- What are the requirements for security services to be deployed in the network (Firewall, VPN, IDS/IPS, 802.1x, BYOD, AAA, Private VLANs, ACL, Port Security, etc)? Are there any performance and redundancy requirements for these services?
- Can you provide current network diagram?
Also I’d like to add a few entry questions about data centers as well. After all servers are phisically connected to wired network infrustructure.
- How many servers are used / planned to be deployed in the near future?
- What applications are going to be run on servers and what would be server roles?
- What type of interfaces are they supposed to use to connect to LAN?
- Are there any requirements to connection speed for the servers?
- How many physical ports are required to connect servers to LAN?
- Are dedicated SAN switches required? If yes, then what protocol support is required and how many physical ports needed? Is redundancy required?
