Focus on Five Dimensions of Network Design to Improve Performance and Save Money

Traditional network design practices do not adequately support the modern user. These design practices need to move beyond connecting the dots and sizing bandwidth. This research provides a framework for network personnel to improve user experience and reduce expenditures by 30%.

• Traditional network design practices focusing primarily on location and bandwidth no longer address current IT service delivery models.
• Network designs must account for proliferating IT consumerization, including mobility, software as a service (SaaS) and bring your own device (BYOD).

• To optimally serve the business, network architects need to shift their thinking from technology to users and business processes.
• As part of a cross-functional team, network architects must become an integral part of application life cycle activities.

Network architects must expand their thinking to include individual users, devices and application requirements early in the network design process. Enterprises that adapt their design practices to this approach will build better networks while optimizing their spending on business-critical technologies.

Traditional network design practices focused almost entirely on sizing bandwidth and ensuring connectivity to users and locations. This inevitably led many companies to throw bandwidth at the problem in the form of higher classes of services on their Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks, which often meant overinvesting in capacity with minimal improvement to application performance. Although it is still necessary to perform these functions, the job of a network architect no longer starts or ends there.

Changing application environments, user expectations and network services demand that network architects expand their thinking to ensure that the network supports new and changing business requirements. They need to address five dimensions – users, applications, devices, location and activity – in a framework (see Figure 1) that best support enterprise applications, both internally and externally hosted.

Figure 1. Five Dimensions of Network Design

Source: Gartner (March 2013)

Users are the ultimate consumers of IT services, and network practitioners must not lose sight of this. In essence, users are the drivers behind technology, not vice versa. It is important to consider all user communities, including those outside the corporate umbrella. In particular, users such as partners and customers outside an organization's direct control often need to be better accounted for. For example, partners typically require access to internal systems that were originally designed for local access. Consequently, accessing these systems remotely yields poor performance and requires technology or process modification. Some businesses have users such as franchisees and agents that they might influence, but not absolutely control. The key aspect of the user dimension is that enterprises cannot assume one size fits all. Designs should accommodate the varied business demand profiles of different users.

Understanding the applications running on the network is an important aspect of network design. Consider which applications and protocols are running. Are these applications time-sensitive, such as voice and video, or are they hosted via a centralized data center or distributed? It is critical to be aware of pending application architecture changes. For example:

• Are business-critical applications being migrated from one software vendor to another?
• Are there initiatives to create or expand delivery of mobile applications, or an enterprise service bus (ESB)?
• Is a major server or data center consolidation project contemplated?

To gain visibility into these areas, network architects must become more involved in application life cycle processes.

In addition to user-centric applications, infrastructure applications need to be considered. For example, converged storage, virtual machine mobility and big data have specific latency and bandwidth requirements and are changing traffic flows in the data center. These applications require increased server-to-server (east/west) communications versus traditional user-to-server (north/south). This requires network architects to re-evaluate traditional hierarchical network designs optimized for north/south traffic flows.

Devices are proliferating to the level that it can no longer be assumed that enterprise applications will be deployed to a common PC platform. Mobile devices and tablets running Android and iOS are commonplace, and BYOD is gaining corporate acceptance. Continued IT consumerization will cause further proliferation of device types and OS environments, and will shift traffic from wired to wireless networks. Specialized devices, such as shop floor and process control devices, are key in some environments and must be considered. Therefore, enterprises can no longer suppose that they will have a known list of end-user devices or that they will have control over them when designing network solutions.

Location encompasses the past concepts of ensuring appropriate bandwidth and connectivity for corporate locations, and appropriate access for remote employees. However, network designers need to think beyond physical corporate sites to areas that are not under the direct control of the enterprise – for example, home offices, mobile-worker situations, and the locations of suppliers, providers, customers and trusted third parties. Locations outside direct enterprise control will need different approaches to ensure optimal application performance. Given the correlation between latency and application performance, pay particular attention to the distance between users and services they consume. Customers will generally rely on the Internet as an access method. Business partners will typically utilize multiple access methods, including the Internet through a VPN, dedicated connectivity or a hybrid of the two. Location also needs to consider external service providers that contribute to the IT architecture, including SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) providers.

Activity looks at what users actually do at the end of the connection. This dimension is all about providing context to the connection, and considers how users interact with the network and the type of the interaction. For example, usage could be highly predictable and largely consistent when dealing with a call center agent. It could be consistent from an application perspective, but highly variable and spiky for computer-aided design (CAD) or software development engineers; or it could be completely random for knowledge workers. Activity can include concepts that capture the relative importance of certain activities. For example, file system access for users whose primary business function is interacting, compiling and modifying file-based resources is critically important and will significantly impact users' productivity. Casual file system interaction for many knowledge workers will have no effect on personal productivity or the business.

These new concepts will lead network architects to think differently about many areas where they may be used to using standard, well-understood methodologies or "rules of thumb." Table 1 illustrates some of the ideas that the five dimensions introduce to the design process.

Table 1. The New Dimensions of Network Design

The five-dimensions approach is a paradigm shift for designing networks, but can be approached pragmatically. Network architects can focus on the following three steps to start the process:

• Network architects must become an integral part of application architecture teams and processes.
• To understand business requirements, network architects must go beyond IT. This requires direct communications with business users.
• They must utilize the framework to evaluate future network design decisions, including vendor selection.

The traditional job of a network architect includes interacting with network operations, network engineering, IT security, server, platform, storage and virtualization teams. Network architects must increase interaction with application architecture teams to achieve early inclusion in application initiatives. This will help ensure that appropriate network solutions are designed in conjunction with applications, leading to better performance.

It is important to reach out to the various user groups in your organization – for example, manufacturing, development, customer support, sales, marketing and finance in a manufacturing organization; or nurses, radiology technicians and doctors in a medical services organization. The focus of the discussions should be what drives users' productivity. Dig beyond statements such as "I need a faster network connection" or "I need an iPad" to determine which applications or constraints are negatively impacting productivity. One approach is to hold workshops with various groups or across groups to brainstorm and compile organizational requirements.

While this research is narrower than the more-complete target discussed here, it provides a useful framework for gathering business and user information outside IT. Organizations that follow the Six Sigma methodology can use the voice-of-the-customer process to gather this information. By gaining this understanding, IT will be in a better position to translate the business requirements and bottlenecks into technical requirements and solutions.

Once network architects understand where and how users work and what applications they use, they can start translating the data into a set of network technologies. This process can go hand in hand with cost-containment activities that many organizations face. As portions of the network come due for refresh or as new deployments are required, the work performed can form the basis of an RFP document sent to a shortlist of vendors. This approach will ensure that network infrastructure best meets business requirements, and the competitive nature of selecting a final vendor will reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by 15% to 25%. Recent Gartner client inquiries confirm even greater savings – averaging around 30%. The five-dimensions process enables organizations to better understand their requirements and, ultimately, to build a better network at a reduced cost of acquisition and operations.