SERVICES AND SUPPORT

The most important networking decisions are made long before the first data transmission. What type of network will suit your organization best? Most internetworks fall into one of two categories: those that have been well designed and those that have merely been pieced together over time. The perceptible difference between these two types of networks illustrates the importance of good design. A well-designed network shows consistently high performance in application response time, the variation in response time, and other performance parameters.

Resilience
Your network should provide a resilient platform for the applications it supports. A highly specified network might have to meet an availability target of 99% for all applications with a zero-downtime requirement for mission-critical applications. Ideally, the failure of any one link or networking device along the client-to-server path should not result in the loss of a client-server session. Automatic failover to an alternate path should occur within a time interval short enough to minimize the effect on existing sessions.

Scalability
When designing a network our engineers always recommend both software and hardware that will not be outgrown as your users or data needs expand.
A scalable network can support growth without having to be radically redesigned. It can handle both the addition of users, network nodes or sites and the addition of new applications with increased bandwidth needs.
To get a feeling for how scalable your network is, ask yourself the following question: What if my network had to serve twice the number of users, twice the number of nodes, or new applications that demanded twice the bandwidth? A scalable network can accommodate this growth and change without significant changes to its infrastructure.
You should not have to redesign the fundamental network topology or the technology you use to accommodate growth. New nodes and users can be added to a scalable network in a simple building-block approach. Adding new nodes, for example, should simply entail the addition of a new section or block to an existing structure that serves as the core or backbone of the network. To accommodate increased bandwidth demands, you should be able to appropriately augment the LAN and WAN bandwidth as necessary.

Security
Access to your information should be instantaneous but also controlled, to keep prying eyes, both within and outside your organization from viewing sensitive data. We use the industry's leading firewall and directory services to enable security on the networks that we build. For more information about security, please check our Firewalls and Security section.

Stability
Our engineers will build in the maximum redundancy into every system we install to mitigate down time. Our commitment to disaster recovery after component failure is foremost.

Make the most of your office equipment - with a well-designed network. A small team of capable engineers, who report on a general level to management, should resolve the details of the network design process no matter how large or how small your organization might be. After thorough discussion on requirements with the client, we design networks in our labs - not on the paper.