Network Design Evaluation

Any Network that is well designed should satisfy the characteristics listed below:

• Network uptime: Any network should be designed to be up all the time, this means that you have to understand your network and what failures may affect the network operation and provide all means of redundancy to ensure virtually 100% uptime of your network. This is usually a trade off between the criticality of the applications running over the network and the budget.
• Network reliability: Administrators have to make sure that at any given time the network is capable of delivering packets to their destinations in a timely fashion with an acceptable delay and jitter profile. The good designer must understand his traffic, its characteristics and the acceptable performance to keep the network running smoothly.
• Network security: The network should be as hard as possible for an attacker to disturb and the administrators must have a plan to stop or mitigate different types of attacks real time.
• Network management: network management is one of the most critical parts of any network design. Network administrators must be able to reach and monitor all network devices all the time specially in crisis times.
• Network Troubleshooting: problems must be easy to troubleshoot and correct. The network must be fully documented,standardized and follow the best practices as much as possible.
• Network scalability: The network should be able to adapt to growth and business scalability needs without having to make dramatic changes.

These characteristics listed above are some of the characteristics that must be addressed by any good network design.