Network Health Assessments

Do you know the Health of your Network? Allow CNI Services to assist you in keeping track of your networks performance.

• Network Baseline – (requires Internet VPN access for CNI)

1. 1 Month in duration.
2. Collection tools used are Network Associates Sniffers and Concord’s eHealth software
3. WAN Bandwidth Utilization and errors (ATM, Frame Relay, or Serial interfaces)
4. LAN Bandwidth Utilization and errors (ATM, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, or Gigabit)
5. Protocol distribution reported by type and percentages
6. Multicast, Broadcast and Unicast breakdown
7. Application Response Time measurements (ART MIB)
8. Router and Switch CPU, memory, buffer and backplane health reports.

• Network Voice over IP (VoIP) Readiness

1. Includes Network Baseline assessment
2. Runs concurrent with Baseline assessment.
3. Jitter and delay reporting (for Cisco routers only)
4. Analysis of WAN routers to provide QoS for congestion management
5. Bandwidth requirements to support VoIP
6. Analysis of LAN Switches for QoS congestion management capabilities.

• Current Network Design Review and New Technology Assessment

1. Including Network Baseline report
2. Including Baseline and VoIP readiness assessment
3. Analysis of current LAN and WAN design
4. Review of router, switch, and VPN configurations to verify correct software versions, configurations and valid design implementation.
5. Recommendations for replacement of older (3-5 year old) Network Infrastructure technology with new (e.g. VPN in place of Dial-up, Firewall and Intrusion detection, Voice over IP, Switched 10/100/1000 in place of shared hub Ethernet, Layer 3 switching in the core vs. routers, etc.).
6. Implementation planning guidelines.

All work will be completed by CNI Staff. All engineers are either Cisco CCIE’s, Nortel Design Expert or Network Associates CNX certified. In most cases, individual engineers hold multiple of these industry certifications. These certifications are the highest available for each of these vendors’ certification programs.

Reasons for Customer to do these Assessments

For the Baseline Assessment

• Customers need to have an idea of the performance of their WAN mostly but also the LAN. WAN bandwidth is expensive. Are they experiencing slowdowns due to constrained links?
• What new applications (Web based, Enterprise level applications, VoIP, video over IP) will cause existing services to break or begin performing unacceptably?
• The customer just upgraded to a new version of Microsoft 2000 server or exchange (for example) and they’re now getting terrible performance out of a network that was completely upgraded in 2001 and they don’t know why.
• What new applications will simply not work properly due to their demanding bandwidth and response time requirements?
• Customer may need to justify an upgrade to the LAN or WAN. They may know things need to work better but do not have a way to quantify things.
• Have they had a major outage?

For the VoIP Assessment

• Are they considering a VoIP conversion or Video over IP?
• Customer may want to prove they cannot do VoIP or some other technology. They may simply not want to go down a technology path for personal reasons. We could provide “proof’ they can take back to management to head off a CIO blindly saying their company is going to do VoIP without really knowing what it all involves.

For the Design Assessment

• Some customers may not be sure they have the right mix of technology. They may not have changed things in 3-5 years and want establish a new 3-5 year plan. These reports could become the foundation of their “own” 3-5 year plan.
• Did they recently do a major upgrade and are now questioning the soundness of what they did?
• Is the network not performing as expected? They may need an independent assessment to confirm things either way?
• Have they had a major outage recently?
• Are they not sure what technology they might benefit from implementing (ultimately saving money).

General Comments

• It doesn’t matter if they have Cisco, 3Com, Nortel, Cabletron, Lucent or Sniffers.
• If they’ve had outages, we can help find out what the cause is.
• If they’re not considering making any upgrades, we can help them get more out of what they have
• If they’ve made an upgrade recently, we can see if it’s running optimally
• If they’re not sure if things are running correctly, we can confirm it either way
• If they don’t know what technology might help them, we can help them figure it out (video or voice over IP, Server load balancing, VPN to replace old dial up modems, firewalls, Intrusion detection, Sniffers, Layer 3 switches, wireless).