Chapter 4: Pre-Design Procedures

CCDA Exam Topics Covered in this Chapter:

• Gather and evaluate information regarding an organization’s existing social requirements.

• Gather and evaluate information regarding a network owner’s current data network and future needs.

• Gather and evaluate information regarding a network owner’s current voice network and future needs.

• Identify possible opportunities for network improvement.

• Validate gathered information.

• Document relevant findings.

• Develop an implementation plan.

Now that we’ve covered some of the basics of internetworking, you are ready to begin the design process. Let’s begin by introducing Cisco’s Small- to Medium-Sized Business Framework, a framework that can be used to categorize and solve typical customer issues. Before getting started in the actual design process, there are two preliminary steps you need to complete. The first step is a thorough inventory of the customer’s current network. This step is almost always necessary and would only be skipped if there were no existing network. The second step is to evaluate the customer’s needs and expectations in detail. These two steps provide the equivalent of a location (where the customer’s network is currently), a direction, and a final location (customer’s needs and expectations). Once this information is established, the actual design process can begin. This chapter explains how to gather this information; Chapters 5 through 11 describe the design process.

The main topics addressed in this chapter are as follows:

• Identify all the data you should gather to characterize the customer’s existing network.

• Document the customer’s current applications, protocols, network topology, and number of users.

• Document the customer’s business issues that are relevant to a network design project.

• Assess the health of the customer’s existing network and make conclusions about the network’s ability to support growth.

• Determine the customer’s requirements for new applications, protocols, number of users, peak usage hours, security, and network management.

• Diagram the flow of information for new applications.

• Isolate the customer’s criteria for accepting the performance of a network.

• List some tools that will help you characterize new network traffic.