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Today, We are going to highlight the Top 7 Design Use Cases you need for a great Design Mindset.
Above all else, your mindset is the most important item in Network Design. Your Design Mindset!! Knowing technology is critical but it is the easy portion. We can put in the effort and time to learn what we don’t know from a technology perspective. A lot of people that create Network Designs do not have a proper Design Mindset. Most of us are not taught the proper design mindset until later in our careers.
The Top 7 Design Use Cases
1 Greenfield
A Greenfield Design Use case is one of the best situations for Designers to be in. A couple of items to keep in mind though. Do not over-engineer the solution. Make sure each element of the Design and Architecture has a specific Business Requirement it rolls back too.
Remember this isn’t your CCIE lab, this is a new production network you are building from scratch.
2 Brownfield
I find myself in Brownfield situations more often than not. Make sure you prepare for the migration to the new design. Limit the potential failures if any and make sure to rely on your Design Principals. Ensure fault isolation each step of the way.
3 Add / Replace Technology
Make sure when you are replacing a technology or adding a new technology, that you are doing it for the correct reasons. Deploying SD-WAN to replace your WAN Architecture without a valid reason is not the way to go. Make sure there are direct business justifications for you to do what you are doing.
4 Merger
The second hardest of the Design Use Cases in my opinion. When you are bringing two companies together, make sure to watch for overlapping technologies like Subnets. When these issues do occur, because they will happen, have a short term and long term plan. Make sure you are properly articulating both plans with Senior Leadership. Also, consolidated as much as possible. If between the two companies you have 4 Data Centers, consolidate them down to 2 Data Centers.
5 Divest
The hardest of the Design Use Cases. When we are forced to take apart an Architecture, we are usually left with two disjointed systems. It’s our job as Designers to ensure that all of these leftover Businesses still function along their respective lines of effort. Each Business needs to continue making money, and we have to ensure that it is possible with the independent architectures leftover.
6 Scaling
Scaling technologies and architectures is a great Design Use Case. We are brought it to help solve a problem with a technology or architecture. It could be as simple as a single flat area 0 OSPF design, that just doesn’t scale anymore. In which case, we could leverage multiple areas, multiple area types, and some LSA filer if needed. We have tools in our toolbox, we just have to leverage them here!
7 Design Failure
Finally, Number 7 of our Design Use Cases, which is our Design Failure Use Case. 9 times out of 10, this is the Design Use Case we are brought in to fix. A simple example of this is not aligning the critical roles of STP and FHRP. If your root bridges and default gateways are not aligned to the correct devices than you could have a suboptimal routing issue that could lead to a Design Failure. In the below topology you can see this specific issue happening for User 1!
Because of the location for the STP Root bridge and the VRRP VIP (Default Gateway), we have a suboptimal routing situation that overtime becomes a Design Failure. Check out the traffic path for User 1 in the below topology.
As you can see here, for User 1 to get out to the internet, it has to travel through SW3 -> SW4 -> SW2 -> SW1 -> R1 because the link between SW1 and SW3 is in a STP blocking state. This is a Design Failure!
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