Chapter 11

Network Design and Management

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All Rights
Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
After reading this chapter you should be able to:
• Explain how project management, application lifecycle management,
and change management help with planning for changes on a
network
• Identify methods to analyze a proposed design or change
• Describe tools and methods used to monitor and manage a network
• Describe tools and methods used to deploy‫ نشر‬and manage cloud
resources

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Introduction
• Properly designing a computer network is a difficult task
– Computer networks continue to increase in complexity
– It is difficult for an individual or a business to properly define the future of
computing within a company
– Computer network technology changes at a breakneck speed‫فائقة‬
– It requires planning and analysis, feasibility studies, capacity planning,
and baseline creation skills, among others
• Performing network management is difficult too
– Network managers must possess‫ يمتلكون‬computer, people, management,
and financial skills while keeping up with changing technology

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Planning for Changes
• All companies have several goals such as increasing the
customer base, keeping services as effective as possible,
increasing the profit levels, and efficiently/effectively conducting
business
– From such goals, systems planners and management personnel
within a company try to plan changes to be implemented in order to
move the organization forward
• The planning for change reflects on concerns‫ مخاوف عن‬about:
– Project management
– Application lifecycle management
– Change management

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Project Management (1 of 2)
• To deal with a problem, including a computer networks one, it is
necessary to analyze possible solutions, select the best one, and
implement and maintain it according to a well-defined plan
• Project management is the application of specific skills, tools, and
techniques to manage processes in such a way that the desired
outcome is achieved
– Communication
– Negotiation
– Task and time management
– Cost and quality management
– Risk management
– Leadership

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Project Management (2 of 2)

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
ALM - Application Lifecycle Management (1 of 4)
• ALM is a specific use of project management
– The application lifecycle follows the progression of an application
from its conception through its retirement

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 ALM - Application Lifecycle Management (2 of 4)

• The most active portion‫جزء‬

of the ALM is the software
development phase,
which is also referred to
as the SDLC (software
development life cycle)
– In the past, organizations
took a linear path to
SDLC called the
waterfall method

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 ALM - Application Lifecycle Management (3 of 4)

• With the increasing speed of technology

advancement, organizations are finding
the waterfall method can no longer keep
up with demand
– The need for more efficiency and faster
response times has resulted in a
continuous or cyclical software
development approach that offers
increased agility, which is the ability to
adapt quickly to market demands
according to increased or decreased
feature use within an application
Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 ALM - Application Lifecycle Management (4 of 4)

• The streamlining and built-in

repetition of the application
lifecycle, along with the increased
collaboration between the teams
working on each app, has come
to be known as DevOps
(development and operations)
– Once an application is deployed, the data
gathered from monitoring the
application’s use can immediately inform
efforts to develop new features for the
application
Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Change Management (1 of 4)
• Change management consists of carefully defined processes to
evaluate:
– the need for a change,
– the cost of the change,
– a plan for making the change with minimal disruption, and
– a backup plan if the change does not work as expected
• The emphasis‫ التركيز‬on agility results in a focused effort toward
collaboration among teams, automation of processes, and faster
turnover of changes:
– Changes are released more often through continuous integration
– Continuous delivery deploys changes in small increments on a short time
schedule
Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Change Management (2 of 4)
• Generally, the larger an organization, the more documentation is
necessary when making network changes
• While simple security patches sometimes are made without an official
change request process, more relevant changes are usually dealt with
in five steps:
– Submit a change request document
– Understand and follow the approval process
– Follow project management procedures
– Provide additional documentation
– Close the change

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Change Management (3 of 4)
Table 11-1 Parts of a change request document
Information Example
Person submitting the change request and The network administrator is submitting the request, and the director of IT must
person who must authorize the change approve it.
Type of change Software patch‫تصحيح البرنامج‬

Reason for change To fix a bug

Configuration procedures An upgraded application might require new data file templates be built, settings
‫إجراءات التكوين‬ defined for an entire department of users, or existing data be converted to a
new format.
Potential impact Ten users in the Accounting Department will need three hours of training.

Grounds for rollback The new application doesn’t work as expected, and the Accounting Department
head decides it’s best to go back to the old way of doing things.
Notification process Managements and users will be informed of the change through email.

Timeline for the change Anticipated downtime is two hours.

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Change Management (4 of 4)
Table 11-2 Documentation edits

Documentation Example Edits

Network configuration The network was segmented with three new VLANs
‫تكوين الشبكة‬ and subnets added.
IP address utilization IP address ranges were assigned to the three new
‫ استخدام عنوان‬IP subnets.
Additions to the network New routers and switches were installed to
accommodate new VLANs to handle additional
network traffic.
Physical location changes Twenty workstations, a switch, and two printers
were moved to a different building on the corporate
campus.

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Analyzing Design
• When considering changes to make to a network or its various resources,
you’ll need to consider both current and future requirements
• Some important tools to do so are:
– Network Modeling
▪ To identify connected systems at the WAN, MAN, and LAN levels
– Gap Analysis
▪ To identify the differences (the gap) between current and desired states
– Feasibility Studies‫دراسات الجدوى‬
▪ To determine the practicality of proposed changes identified in the gap analysis
– Capacity Planning
▪ To try to determine the amount of network bandwidth necessary
– Testing Environments
▪ To keep separate testings from the production environment

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Network Modeling
• Network models can either:
– Demonstrate current state of network
– Model desired computer network
• Series of connectivity maps are network modeling tools that
depict‫ تصور‬various locations involved over wide and local areas and
interconnections between those locations
– To create a wide area connectivity map, the modeler begins by
identifying each site or location in which the company has an office
– A metropolitan area connectivity map outlines the connection among
company’s offices
– A local area overview connectivity map describes logical and physical
groups as a single node and the links among those nodes by factors as
throughput, bandwidth, distance, or security
Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Gap Analysis
• A gap analysis is a study used to
compare current conditions with
desired conditions and identifying how
to close that gap
• Both current and desired conditions
are expressed by factors as:
– number of customers, sales
revenue, or rate of growth
– IT costs, number of trouble tickets,
user satisfaction rates, or data
throughput
• Those factors might be referred as
KPIs (key performance indicators)
Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Feasibility Studies
• As results from the gap analysis generate proposed changes, the team
needs a way to determine which suggestions for change are reasonable
• There are several ways to determine if a proposed system is going to be
feasible
– Technically feasible - proposed system can be created and implemented using
currently existing technology
– Financially feasible - proposed system can be built given the company’s
current financial ability
– Operationally feasible - system operates as designed and implemented
– Timely feasible - system can be installed in a timely fashion that meets
organizational needs

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Capacity Planning
• Involves trying to determine the amount of network bandwidth
necessary to support an application or a set of applications
• Several techniques exist for performing capacity planning, including:
– linear projection
– computer simulation
– benchmarking
– analytical modeling

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Testing Environments (1 of 2)
• Planned changes should never be deployed directly in the active
production environment that is currently supporting users and work
processes without extensive testing first
• Typical environment types used through various phases of product
development include:
– Development - a controlled environment where an app can be
developed or changed (patches, improvements, etc.)
– Staging‫ تدريج‬- a different team deploys the app in a staging environment
for QA (quality assurance) and testing
– Production - this is the live environment where users interact with the
active version of the app
– Duplicate production - a duplicate production environment, at least
temporarily, for an application or other services
Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Testing Environments (2 of 2)

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Network Monitoring and Management
• The network requires ongoing monitoring and maintenance to
ensure its continued performance and reliability including during the
time changes are been implemented
– Gaining access to the relevant information can be challenging, and
sorting through all that information can be equally difficult
▪ a network admin must seek an appropriate balance between gathering
all needed information and filtering information to just the important parts,
so staff aren’t inundated with irrelevant data
• To that end it is important to master:
– Network monitoring tools
– The creation of baselines

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
 Network Monitoring Tools (1 of 4)
• Monitoring and diagnostic‫ تشخيص‬tools:
– Monitoring Network Hardware
▪ Electrical testers measure AC and DC volts, resistance, and continuity
▪ Cable testers can verify connectivity and test for line faults, such as open
circuits, short circuits, reversed circuits, and crossed circuits
▪ Network testers have a display that graphically shows a network
segment and all the devices attached to it, thus troubleshooting the
network and suggesting possible corrections
– Monitoring Network Traffic
▪ A network monitor is a tool that continually monitors network traffic
▪ A protocol analyzer can monitor traffic at a specific interface between a
server or client and the network
Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Network Monitoring Tools (2 of 4)

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Network Monitoring Tools (3 of 4)

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.
Network Monitoring Tools (4 of 4)

Jill West | Curt M. White, Data Communications and Computer Networks: A Business User’s Approach, 9th Edition. © 2023 Cengage. All
Rights Reserved. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part.