Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to Trends Driving Network Designs here in the
CCDA series. In this Nugget, we're going to see if we can't
identify some key trends that would really influence
modern network designs. After all, if we understand what major drivers
tend to be in a successful network design, we should
have an advantage when we sit down and go to
draft up a design ourselves. Now because most of us that are watching this
video are in the IT field, we tend to think about technology
drivers as the reason we would design a new network or
enhancements to an existing network.
Sure, we're excited about technology. We want to take advantage of the latest in
voice over IP or video over IP or wireless technologies.
We'll cover technological drivers that are exciting
today that are really driving designs. But I want to really emphasize business drivers.
We want to make sure that when we design the network we're
not just designing it to take advantage of the latest,
greatest exciting technologies. We want to make sure that we are designing
the network to really benefit the organization.
We'll talk about some information technology challenges that we have today that really
can influence our designs.
We'll see what areas Cisco has been focusing on lately.
And we'll wrap up this Nugget by taking a look at ways in
which you can the measure. Anytime we see the word metric, we want to
think about measuring just how successful our network
design is. I mean, how are we going to rate it?
What type of variables will we use to rate how effective a
particular network design is? Now the first business driver for your network
design is typically a term that you've probably heard
if you've ever spent any time around anyone in finance.
Its return on investment. You see, this is a nice measure of whatever
you did for the organization, if it was financially
viable. What return on investment is most often measured
with is what was the gain from whatever you did, minus
the cost of whatever you did, divided by the cost
of whatever you did.
So let's say you design some new technology for an
organization. And they determine you saved them $20,000
with that implementation and it only cost them $5,000
to design. We divide this by that $5,000 to design.
And you can see that there was a positive ROI on that
particular investment. So return on investment is a very critical
driving factor for organizations when you start talking to
them about a brand new network design or enhancements to
the design. Will they get so-called *** for their buck
with the network implementation?
Governmental regulations are driving designs of networks
more than ever. Have your heard of something called HIPAA?
Yeah. This is a famous new government regulation,
relatively new. It was invented in 1996.
This is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
And this insures that health organizations properly secure
your medical records. So you can see how government regulations
like HIPAA would drive designs.
After all, maybe the medical organization wasn't going to
put much stock in security infrastructures. And now they realize they could be heavily
fined if they don't, so they're more interested in designing
security into the network. And finally, competitiveness.
The world of business-- as we go through recession after recession,
or great recession after recession, or heaven forbid
depression after depression, the world of business becomes
increasingly competitive.
And the more competitive businesses become with each
other, the more organizations will look to their networking
capabilities. And they'll see if they can squeeze more efficiency
and squeeze more ROI out of their organization
to improve the bottom line.
So things are more competitive in business than ever.
And we see that being another business driver in modern
network designs. Now it's time for us to get really excited
about what drives network designs, because we're going
to take a look at technology drivers.
Sure. What's happening in technology that really
tends to influence modern network designs?
Well, I'll tell you right now, networks have become
borderless. Yeah.
Thanks to things like wireless technologies, thanks to
amazing advancements in wide area networking and VPNs,
individuals are getting accustomed to be able to work
wherever they are located. If they're in a beach condo, if they're in
a hotel, if they're at home, if they're at the office,
if they're in a park or a courtyard at the office, if they're
at a fast food restaurant, more and more individuals
are working without borders really holding them back.
And this is a major technological area of influence.
Now how about virtualization? Sure.
We hear this buzz term all the time. Let me show you one example of virtualization.
I'm going to draw here two server cabinets. And then inside each of these server cabinets,
we have these blade servers.
We'll just say there's three blade servers in each of the
server cabinets. On one of these blade servers, we might have
one, two, three instances of Windows running, Windows operating
systems. And maybe the virtualized environment, the
virtualization software, notices that on this particular cabinet, there's a low rate of
utilization because over here in this cabinet, there's
all kinds of utilization going on on the operating systems
that are over there.
So what the virtualized environment can do is it can
literally migrate operating systems from one cabinet to another.
These types of amazing capabilities in virtualized networks, as you might guess, are really
helping to drive designs. By the way, another great example when it
comes to the power of virtualization is, what if the operating
systems in this cabinet come under attack?
So we're having computer attackers attack these systems.
Again, the systems could be migrated to other areas in the
infrastructure. And this is really, really information technology
in the 21st century.
Now something else that really tends to drive modern network
designs is just the overall growth of really exciting what
we call mission-critical applications. There are amazingly powerful applications
now in the area of customer service.
There's amazingly powerful applications for sales.
There's amazingly intense HR applications. There's remarkable finance applications.
You get the idea. The list goes on and on of exciting new application
areas for organizations.
And oftentimes, organizations discover that they need to
tweak the network design in order to accommodate these
applications. Now here's an area that influences network
designs that might be near and dear to your heart.
If you're in an information technology department, you
probably recognize one or all three of these challenges.
The first, money. Yeah.
The budget. We need this brand new application right away,
so your network has to feature this level of
latency right away. Get it done.
And oh, by the way, we have no money. There's no additional funding for this particular
project. Best of luck.
Yeah. Budgets are a huge concern, especially when
we're in those times of recession or a great recession or
depression. Another factor is expertise.
We want to roll out the very best of services and the very
best of applications to our employees and to management.
But we want to make sure that the IT department has
individuals that are well trained in how to deliver on
those services and applications and keep them running in a way where they are two things,
highly available, meaning they're actually there,
and highly reliable, meaning they're functioning the
way they're supposed to function.
Thank goodness for companies like CBT Nuggets, because with
CBT Nuggets, of course, we are making the number one focus on
employees efficiently gaining the expertise they need to
implement and to design functional, highly available,
highly reliable networks. How about silos?
Well, what we mean by this buzz term is the information
technology department can really start to segregate
itself much too dramatically. You've got server people.
And the server people say, we are the server people.
And we don't want to talk to the wireless people.
The wireless people, all they do is give us problems.
And the wireless people don't want to talk to those really
strange guys and girls in the data center. And the people in the data center have no
idea what's going on with the voice over IP people.
So your information technology department can
become really siloed. And what we want instead, of course, is we
want all of these groups to be able to work together very
well in order to accommodate the business needs of
the organization.
Now, since Cisco is such a giant in the networking industry and they are going to be responsible
for so many of our designs and implementations, we should
probably look at where they are heading when it comes to
designing networks. Cisco is really emphasizing something that
we talked about earlier, and that's borderless networking.
One of the things that happens with borderless networking is
not only does someone want to be able to accomplish their
work from anywhere, but they also want to do
what's called BYOD. Now I've heard of BYOB, but what is BYOD?
It's bring your own device. Yeah.
Bring your own device, meaning you want to be able to
accomplish work no matter where you are, but you also
want to be able to do it on your iPad, on your Android
tablet, on your iPhone, on your Google phone, on your
Galaxy device. It doesn't matter what device you're using,
doesn't matter where you are, you want to be productive.
Can you imagine the impact that this has on network security?
Can you imagine the impact that this has on reliability
of network services? Because now you have to worry about securing
this information across all these different devices.
And you have to make sure that the applications perform
properly on all these different devices. So borderless networking, a tremendous area
of challenge, a driving force that Cisco recognizes.
And it's really been working on lately. Cisco also focuses now on the data center,
specifically that virtualization inside the data center that
we were speaking of earlier.
So they want a highly modular, highly available, highly
reliable, and highly virtualized data center environment for organizations of any size.
And I want to emphasize that. When it comes to data center technologies,
Cisco wants to be able to provide a design option for an
organization that might be massive like Google, but they
also want to be able to provide virtualized data center
technologies for small growing businesses.
And again, they want to make them modular so that the
organization can just keep adding on to the data solution
and scale how much data they are storing very easily.
Finally, the other area of focus that we've noticed with
Cisco Systems lately is collaboration. As you probably know, Cisco went out and acquired
a little company called WebEx.
And one of the reasons Cisco made this acquisition was
because they wanted to really emphasize team members getting
together from wherever they are in the borderless network
and being able to conduct training sessions and
marketing sessions and really just collaborate on ideas that
can take the business forward. A key aspect of collaboration for Cisco, as
you might guess, is things like voice over IP and video over
IP. And these are integrated right into solutions
like WebEx. Another key terminology here under this area
of collaboration that you may have heard is telepresence,
where we can go ahead and have that what used to be
considered futuristic dialogue with a co-worker where we're
both looking at each other. Yeah.
This used to be done, of course, on the Star Trek
Enterprise, right? Captain Kirk would sit down in the bridge
and he would talk to the Klingons.
And they would be looking at each other as they're having
this dialogue. And this looked futuristic to us when we were
kids. But now, of course, this is commonplace in
Cisco collaboration designs.
Now, of course it's really easy to get more information
on these major areas of focus from Cisco Systems via their website.
In fact, this is pretty funny. No, I don't think I'll chat right now.
No thanks. So notice that Cisco will organize their website
and their products and solutions on these major
initiatives. So here we can see Cisco has a whole area
of their site dedicated to none other than collaboration.
We can go there. And we can say, hey.
What are the current products and solutions that you are
utilizing when it comes to collaboration, Cisco?
And Cisco says, OK. Well, we have this area called Unified Communications.
This is that voice and video over IP area. We have an area dedicated to customer collaboration,
where customers can chat with each other and have
all kinds of unique engagement opportunities with each
other over the network.
And specific applications that we've geared around
collaboration. And of course, as you can see, a growing area
of Cisco's collaboration efforts is in telepresence,
where we have that just ease of having meetings where we
can visually see each other and we can be located anywhere
in the world attending that particular event.
Now, we want to be thinking in terms of success as we
implement a network design or a network enhancement. How would we measure success?
Well, here are six common areas that we would use to
measure the success of a design. Let's keep these in mind as we design to make
sure we're successful.
Does it work? Yeah, not a bad idea to ask this question,
does the network actually do what it is set out to
do? Is it scalable?
Does the network easily adjust when we add large numbers of users?
If we have set up a telepresence collaborative initiative in our network design and it's
to accommodate 10 people, but our organization quickly gets
hooked on this new technology and we're told that we have to
accommodate 50 people, 5 times the original amount, how easy
is it for us to tweak the network to re-engineer and
redesign portions of the network to accommodate those new users?
That is scalability. Availability.
We talked about this earlier. Availability is often measured with the five
nines scale. In other words, it used to be perfect if your
network was available 99.999% of the time.
But nowadays, companies are striving for even greater
availability. They talk in terms of seven nines and eight
nines of availability.
So this is another measure of how successful your design is,
how often are those services and those applications actually there?
Performance. I often term performance as reliability.
But whether you call it reliability or whether you
call it performance, it all comes down to, is the network
behaving at or above its baseline of performance? If you promise to people that they could make
these telepresence calls and that they would be
just like sitting in a room across from another individual,
does the end user experience actually reflect that?
Is the network reliably perfo up to expectations? Another great metric for the success of your
design is manageability.
How easy is it to manage the network that you have designed?
Is it an absolute nightmare or is it borderless? Can you literally be anywhere, anytime, on
any device and perform management of the network that's been
constructed? What a clever idea that would be to extend
the concept of borderless networking to you managing your
own network. And finally, the last metric that we would
typically use to measure our design effectiveness is efficiency.
How overall efficient is your network design? Did you get a lot accomplished with very little
additional overhead into the functioning of the network?
Did you get a lot of accomplished without a huge
additional investment when it came to your network design?
So these are some excellent ideas for design metrics that
can really, if you keep them in mind as you design, really
have you design something special. So in this Nugget on the CCDA series, we really
took a look at trends that are really driving our
network designs today. We talked about business drivers, things like
the importance of a return on investment or governmental
regulations. We talked about technology drivers, things
like borderless networking and virtualization.
We visited painfully the challenges that IT departments
face, like shrinking budgets and a lack of expertise and
how we kind of silo the IT department and it's tough to
get people to work together. We examined the areas of focus for Cisco,
things like collaboration and the data center and virtualization.
And another huge area that Cisco focuses on is that
borderless networking area. And finally, we wrapped up by taking a look
at metrics that we can easily use to gauge the overall effectiveness
of our network design.
I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.