Design for consultants

For those of you that do consulting, what type of design material do you study (or are all of your designs based on experience)?

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shodown

cisco design zone is where I usually start and will start removing the crap that cisco wants you to have in the Desgin, but they give you a good place to start. TOP down network design is also a good place. With that said, most of the networks you will encounter will already be up and running so its best to be able to look at the design figure out traffic flow, and how you are going to improve it or add to it. Case in point, we had a customer that has several companies operating out of there facility it must have been a gazillion sub interfaces on that router with all crazy types of access list for them. it musta been around 30 pages of IOS config for a 3800 series router, and a pain in the A$$ to make changes which always brought errors as the customer told us cause one change breaks something else. We enter in and add a ASA and setup context so each company has its own policy and it became instantly eaiser to manage and easier for the onsite admins to handle.

Turgon

Bl8ckr0uter wrote: »

For those of you that do consulting, what type of design material do you study (or are all of your designs based on experience)?

Most design is based off commercial requirements. Once can design a brilliant network with uber resilience but passing that cost onto the customer can break your pricing model and make you uncompetitive.

shodown

Turgon wrote: »

Most design is based off commercial requirements. Once can design a brilliant network with uber resilience but passing that cost onto the customer can break your pricing model and make you uncompetitive.

yeah its never the good network you build, unless its DOD, its always just good enough. When I was working as a defense contractor we could build whatever we wanted.

Bl8ckr0uter

shodown wrote: »

yeah its never the good network you build, unless its DOD, its always just good enough. When I was working as a defense contractor we could build whatever we wanted.

How do you make that determination (between good and good enough)?

shodown

Good network we had private lines going everywhere and we had complete control all routing decisions, Good enough network we only had private lines to core and critical sites, and everything else was made to be MPLS VPN and we turned over control to the providers, routing changes to private lines sites could be done rather quickly and the MPLS VPN sites we had to open up tickets days in advance and hope we get a competent engineer on the other line who could make the changes. This is just something I was bitter over, but pricing justified it not how we feel as engineers.

Turgon

Bl8ckr0uter wrote: »

How do you make that determination (between good and good enough)?

Experience. Also be aware of your pricing model, your SLAs, your performance and scalar issues, your standards for doing things, your global, national and local technology strategy and your commercial strategy. Too many techs get lost in books only to find the operational world is very different.