The Business Advantages of Proper Network Design

Business advantages with having effective network design and management in place and operational is, that the business would have high scores on all of the measurable network assessment criteria with the associated perks that go along with them. The four measuring criteria for a properly functioning network are: Speed, availability, latency and errors. The business issues that can exist when we do not have proper design and management components would be: slow transmission speeds, lack of availability, transmission latency and error prone transmission of data. There are several network designs that can alleviate such possible issues and improve overall network performance.
Speed is the thing to consider when building a business network. The way to address this is first to evaluate how much traffic the network has currently and to think ahead for future network growth (Bidgoli, 2010). Next one must put in place purchase or lease lines with the speeds necessary for their system needs. In any business whether it be: E-commerce, Data streaming service (Netflix), content provider (pay to download), insurance sales, or even retail. The business will rely on the data flowing fast. Who wants to sit in line at Hollister waiting for the debit processing machine to process someone’s card? Who wants to wait on hold while the insurance agent’s computer is not loading the photos you sent them? Who wants would keep paying to stream movies that keeps freezing? Who will continue to download from a site when it takes way too long to download a small file?
Availability is the next thing to consider to ensure that a business will not have costly problem with their system. Having redundancy in the lines between systems helps to improve the availability of a system. Systems should also have information in more than one place and have a backup power source. Availability is crucial to a business, there is a saying in my company “If you do not take care of the customer, someone else will”. But to put this is simple terms, if you want to buy a book for school and you log into the school library to download it and the page does not load, do you continue to try, I know I don’t. In 10 seconds if the page don’t load I copy and paste the book title to Amazon. I assume many people are the same (Cohen, 2014). You go to the barber to get your hair cut but your barber is not in, you may try back tomorrow but if they still are not there you get someone else to cut your hair, maybe this new one does better or is more reliable, and even cheaper. Just like that a business losses customers and it is the same in any business.
Latency could also affect a business system performance, especially for voice over IP systems (VOIP), and teleconferencing. Latency issues can be addressed by utilizing Network Management Tools (NMTs), to identify the source of the latency then repairing or upgrading the switches/routers causing the latency (Bidgoli, 2010). Latency can have a devastating effect to a business especially if they are using VOIP. Think about those old commercials when the person on one end of the line misheard the person on the other end and bad things happened. People are easily frustrated and will change who they do business with over very little inconveniences, especially for miscommunication everybody wants to be heard.
Error transmission is the last criteria on the list (Not the least), and finding this is similar to how one finds a latency issue, running NMTs to find the issue. However fixing the issue is of errors can be different. One way one can have high transmission errors is when one sets up a system to multiplex too much data over one line, if this is the cause simply add some dedicated lines to reduce the amount of traffic. I have seen this in my career but did not have a clear explanation of it until reading this chapter. I can explain how this affects a business with my own experience. At one of the job sites I visit frequently they have 16 of out Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) that communicate to the customers Building Management System (BMS), using SNMP protocol (and mod bus but that is not relevant to this). Aside from the 16 UPS modules we also have 16 Switching Devices controlled by GE Program Logic Controllers (PLCs), and all of these devices have their own IP address that we are responsible for. Each of these modules has a Cat 5 cable that goes into an Ethernet switch in the same room, and there are several other devices from other vendors that also attach to these Ethernet switches such as the Chillers, Fire Systems, and Static Transfer Switches (STS), etc. Each of these Ethernet switches is cabled to the control room with Cat 5 cables and I honestly do not know if they are piggy backed room to room (since the building is set up like one long line hallway with each UPS in a room) or it they all have a dedicated line back to the control room from each Ethernet switch. But what I do know is I am constantly being called out to investigate why some of the PLC modules report a “loss of communications” alarm (for a fraction of a second). After checking out my gear and contacting the vendor I told the customer that the alarm was due to a loss of communication with the rest of the system for a fraction of the second and is likely due to all of the network traffic on the system. I further explained that their system is in no danger but that if this problem persists with “The same unit”, and not others that we can certainly replace the faulty module. However of this alarm is coming in on multiple systems that you have to contact your network administrator. The customer then asked me in a kind of nasty tone, why it is only my units that are having this problem, to which I replied in a patronizing tone, “It’s because our gear is the only equipment in this network that can detect such microsecond errors”. To which I opened a can of worms because he then demanded to see the error detection speeds which was a bit of a research project. The point is without knowing that multiplexing too much information on one line nor how to calculate how much data can travel across one line I knew that it was a data traffic issue, and now thanks to this class next time I can explain it perfectly.

By Frank Aiello (Embomb701)
2/7/2019

//Works Cited
Bidgoli, H. (2010). Mis -Student Edition (11) . Boston: Cengage Learning.
Cohen, T. (2014, June 19). thestreets. Retrieved from https://www.thestreet.com/story/12749882/1/will-facebook-fb-stock-be-affected-by-overnight-outage.html