Network Consulting

Capacity & Performance Management

One of the key challenges faced by network managers today is ensuring that designed solutions will, in fact, provide the expected results in terms of connectivity, performance, and availability. Often, a wrong assumption or a simple design decision can lead to catastrophic results in final implementation.What’s more, many applications are becoming “networkaware,” so your network must be designed to meet these very specific requirements.

It all means that your designs must be validated before they impact your business, and before you invest people and financial resources in implementing the solution. You need a way to apply various changes and to accurately and inexpensively evaluate various scenarios. Few organizations have the necessary expertise, sophisticated modeling tools, and available time to perform this critical step.

Houston Technologies Ltd. can help. Our Network Capacity Planning Service actually models and simulates a number of network alternatives for your organization – incorporating changes in design, technologies, components, configurations, cost, and applications – to see which solution is optimal for your organization’s goals and strategies. These can be based on one point in time or a range of times. And, we can apply the criteria that matter to you – cost, manageability, availability, connectivity, and scalability – in choosing your organization’s best solution.

Benefits

• Find problems before they impact your business
• Cost-effectively evaluate multiple alternatives
• Less expensive than prototyping
• Quickly run multiple scenarios
• Validate your assumptions before you invest too much
• You select the evaluation criteria
• Support your business objectives
• Optimize the network to maximize your return on investment
• Understand the limits – and potential – of your network in terms of capacity, reliability, and growth

Why Houston Technologies Ltd.?

• Qualified consultants worldwide to perform Network Capacity Planning
• Documented methodology that allows us to deliver quickly, consistently
• Investment in the necessary tools for data capture, network modeling and simulation
• Custom integration of the tools to improve accuracy of the model

Houston's Network Capacity Planning

After building a realistic baseline representing your current environment, Houston Technologies Ltd. then models selected alternatives based on your criteria. Finally, our professionals help you choose the most appropriate network design for your organization. Six steps are involved:

Define project requirements and metrics

Houston Technologies Ltd. professionals target the required input for your model, such as bandwidth, supported transport protocols, networking features, management features, carrier facilities, quality of service, and regulatory requirements.We will also help you establish criteria for evaluating design alternatives, since these criteria can also determine which inputs are necessary and relevant to the baseline model.

Review network topology

Next, our team gathers and validates information on your current network topology, including maps, diagrams, and standards documents.We even have the use of software- and hardware-based tools to collect these data.

Capture network traffic

After Houston Technologies Ltd. has a complete understanding of your topology, we use your existing network management tools, or our own network analysis tools, to collect network traffic from all relevant network LAN and WAN segments.

Create and validate network baseline model

Using traffic and topology data, we put our network simulation tools to work generating a baseline model of your network environment. Then, we compare it to collected traffic and fine-tune it to maximize accuracy.

Evaluate design alternatives

Using the developed baseline model, we conduct “what-if” scenarios by changing specific attributes of the baseline model with an aim to producing results that help clearly to identify the most appropriate design based on your selection criteria.

Develop recommendations and deliver client report

Then, Houston Technologies Ltd. helps you analyze the simulation results and choose the most appropriate design alternative(s). We consolidate our modeling results into a report that is presented to you, and we map out the appropriate next steps.