10 Top Network Design Best Practices for your Infrastructure
Maximise Your Network’s Potential: 10 Proven Best Practices for Streamlining Your Infrastructure Design | Article
Elevating Your Network with Proven Design Practices
A well-designed data network is critical for any organisation to maintain a competitive edge in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. An effective network design ensures that your infrastructure is agile and reliable and makes it scalable, resilient, and secure. By following best practices in network design, organisations can maximise their network’s potential and ensure it can effectively support mission-critical applications and services. A well-designed data network has numerous benefits, from reducing downtime and improving performance to enhancing security and maximising ROI. This blog post will explore the top 10 best practices for data network design and how they can help organisations achieve their goals. By applying these best practices, organisations can build an agile, reliable, scalable, resilient, and secure network.
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Let’s dive into the subject matter – what to consider when designing Data Network Infrastructure
An effective network design is critical to ensuring your infrastructure is agile, reliable, scalable, resilient, and secure. By following best practices in network design, organisations can build a network optimised for performance and quickly adapt to changing business demands. For example, a well-designed network can help organisations reduce downtime by automating failure recovery processes and ensuring the network is always available. This improves the end-user experience and helps maintain a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.
Moreover, an effective network design allows scaling your infrastructure to meet growing business demands. This is achieved by leveraging technologies such as network virtualisation, which enables organisations to quickly and easily add new devices, services, or applications to their networks. This level of scalability ensures that organisations can continue to grow and innovate without worrying about network performance degradation.
Another key benefit of a well-designed network is improved resilience. By incorporating redundancy and high-availability technologies, organisations can ensure that their networks are always available, even in a network failure. This helps organisations minimise downtime and secure their networks are always performing at peak performance.
Finally, an effective network design also helps organisations improve their security posture. By incorporating security technologies such as firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems, and encrypted communication, organisations can protect their networks from cyber threats and minimise the risk of data breaches. This level of security helps organisations protect their assets and enhances customer confidence and trust.
In conclusion, best practices in network design play a critical role in ensuring that organisations have an agile, reliable, scalable, resilient, and secure infrastructure. By following these best practices, organisations can build a network optimised for performance and quickly adapt to changing business demands. Whether you want to enhance your existing web or create a new one, a well-designed network’s numerous benefits cannot be ignored.
Here are a few interesting facts and statistics about Data Center Networks:
- Data centre networks are the backbone of modern IT infrastructure and are critical in supporting the demands of cloud-based, highly virtualised environments.
- According to a recent survey, over 80% of organisations have reported that their data center networks are critical to their overall business operations.
- The global market for data center networks is expected to reach over $40 billion by 2024, driven by the increasing demand for high-performance, scalable, and secure networks.
- Many organisations are adopting software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) technologies that automate network management and reduce downtime to achieve resiliency and reliability.
- SDN and NFV technologies have been shown to reduce network downtime by up to 90%, making data center networks more resilient and reliable.
- Scalability is also essential for modern data center networks as organisations look to support growing amounts of data and ever-increasing numbers of connected devices.
- According to a recent study, the amount of data being generated and processed by data center networks is expected to reach over 180 zettabytes by 2025.
- The need for scalability drives the adoption of new technologies, such as fabric-based networking, which enables organisations to add new devices, services, or applications to their networks without reconfiguring the entire network.
- Fabric-based networks have been shown to deliver scalable performance, with the ability to handle up to 2 million Layer 2 paths per network.
- Organisations are also adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies to achieve maximum scalability, which enable them to manage multiple cloud environments and optimise their resources for specific workloads and applications.
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10 Top Network Design Best Practices
Outstanding network design is essential, and everyone needs to focus on it until it’s perfect. It will save any business a lot of time and money. The section below shows steps to design networking for a company or business. We are happy to assist you with a network design project. However, we are glad to share some of the knowledge of network design principles to illustrate the process.
Any LAN Design or Network setup must be thought through. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions; we would be happy to help.
Are you planning a small network setup or Enterprise Edge? Network Design Best Practices will benefit you.
1. Draw it; we always start with a drawing or at least a sketch
We have always started with a drawing for any client we have designed or upgraded their network. We listen to their requirement, and then a Physical and Logical Drawing is produced to outline the full scope of the Project. As the saying goes, a picture tells 1,000 words. We explain the whole concept, especially to people who are not technical. Everyone will understand a picture. When we come to the Network Design Project’s implementation and installation phase, a Drawing will be changed at least 15-20 times. It doesn’t end there.
Drawing also holds another primary function. In case of a problem or disaster at any time of day, anyone can look at the Visio drawing and troubleshoot a problem correctly. Therefore, Network Drawings must be continuously updated and kept in a secure, accessible location. Also, it must be very detailed and adequately represent the live network environment.
2. Choose the correct and best equipment for the business requirements
We tend to use significant vendor equipment for our clients. We are driven to deliver the best service and peace of mind to our customers, so the best equipment plays a vital role in accomplishing that. Our networks are built mainly on Cisco Catalyst / Nexus Switches and Routers, including Wireless. We are happy to work on F5 Systems devices for load-balancing and security. In terms of firewalls, we also use Cisco, Checkpoint, etc.… There are other security devices in scope; please check our Solutions – Cyber Security. Section. Inevitably, we will configure all the devices in high availability mode to mitigate any issues due to failure or maintenance.
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3. Plan for the Future – next ten years
As mentioned above, regarding equipment. We must plan as the technology changes and some of the devices may reach the End of Life (EOL) support cycle from the manufacturers. Most likely, bandwidth requirements in a decade will be much higher than they are currently. We must accommodate that and give our clients excellent margins so there are no future bottlenecks in their network environment.
If a client considers a 1Gb connection to the server, we suggest 10Gb or 2x 10Gb using FabricPath. Also, it is vital to look at the manufacturer’s documentation. It says – 10Gb throughput, and is this transmit and receive or only one of those?
Also, putting devices inline is not the best solution as all the traffic must go through them and consumes a lot of bandwidth. Our extensive experience and knowledge suggest several options. We need to be aware of any consequences before they occur.
4. Secure from start to finish
It is essential to be done at the very, very beginning. It is of utmost necessity to secure Clients’ assets, business, resources, and infrastructure – this is protected when the network environment is secure. Layers of computer network security must be implemented at key entry points and within the computer/server network. Many security measures, such as firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, antivirus, and monitoring, need to be implemented. The complete list is mentioned in Solutions – Cyber Security. We always make sure our clients are protected from malicious attacks. Everyone else should do the same and avoid falling victim to cyber exploits or attacks.
5. Copper and Fiber Cabling is important
How is everything going to be connected? With a new network, you must plan well in advance! For our Clients, we will engage subcontractors who will do all copper and fibre on our behalf. However, fundamental questions must be answered regarding the technology – switches that will be used in place. For example, ToR (Top of the Rack) FEXs need different connectivity to Catalyst switches.
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6. Standardise as much as possible
For our clients, we standardise to the maximum for the simple reason of saving them money. There will be some exceptions, but we are trying to avoid them. Even the naming convention needs to be standardised so Network Engineers immediately know where each device is located. In your own network, fewer problems and faults will occur due to those basic steps.
7. Redundancy, Resiliency and High Availability
We always tell and emphasise to our clients that they must avoid a single failure point. Network devices or their components fail from time to time. Infrastructure needs to be prepared to function without affecting users or applications. When this happens, devices can be fixed or replaced without panic or financial or reputational impact on the business. Another benefit, for instance, with Cisco FabricPath, both methods are forwarding traffic – Active/Active Solution. The new ACI Policy-Based framework provides excellent load-balancing and resiliency.
8. Monitoring and Management, Out-of-Band Access
Please check our section regarding this topic – Solutions > Monitoring
We have noticed that not all the companies put in place enough resources into Out-of-Band Access. This is vital when the switch or router doesn’t reload correctly and stops during the power cycle process. Also, sometimes access via the Management port may be severed. OOB access is like RSC or ILO on the Servers.
9. Do research, find out, and ask for advice
Knowledge is one thing, and Experience is the other. In complex deployments, we heavily rely on our Experience. We notice that comprehensive research needs to be done, and we ask for advice if unsure of the solution or process to follow. No one has to know everything
10. Environment: Cooling, Power
In our Experience – Power / Electricity is the weakest point in any Network Infrastructure. We can upgrade NX-OS without a power cycle with new technology like the Cisco Nexus switch. The switch will work for years; however, it will stop if there is no power – quite obvious.
Conclusion
In our view, each step is significant. When implemented correctly, you will enjoy agile, bespoke, secure, resilient network infrastructure. On that kind of backbone, you can build your business. Please contact us if you have any questions or if anything is unclear.
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‘Elevate your network’s potential with top design practices. Each step forward enhances efficiency, reliability, and adaptability.’
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