Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• A good place to start gathering business intelligence is with a high-level overview of the company, its goals, issues, and future direction. (Location 633)
• How big is the company—how many users are connected to the network, how many sites, and where are they located? (Location 637)
• Find out the corporate goals and business strategies. Look for vision statements. Learn where the company is investing its resources—its money, people, time, and technologies—because that shows what is important to them. Look for information on business initiatives planned or in progress, and ask about the drivers for those initiatives. (Location 641)
• Who are the company’s biggest competitors? How has the competitive landscape changed in the past several years? Which new companies have entered the field and which have dropped out? (Location 677)
• What has your business done in response to those changes? How and where does the company interact with the information it needs to survive? (Location 682)
• How well is the application working today? Are there any issues with slowness, or are there other things that might prevent the application from running optimally? How much data does it produce, and what type of data is it? Where does the data need to go? How fast does it need to get there? How important is consistency in the delivery of data? Does the application’s traffic need to be separated from other data, or can it be mixed? Where in the life cycle is the application? Is it just installed, in midlife, or in the process of being replaced? What of the future requirements for those applications? How long will they be in use? (Location 701)
• Profile of the current network Profile of the current support staff Profile of the current network management, monitoring, and support methods (Location 720)
• What computing environment are the users accustomed to? How well is this environment serving them and the business? Is there a need for real computing power at the user’s end of the network, or would tablets or thin clients suffice? An increasing number of companies are moving to thin clients due to the easier management and increased security that they provide, but this means they’ll need a network that can deliver the type of service these clients require. Are there proprietary endpoints, and are endpoints static or mobile? For example, hospitals have computers with proprietary applications on carts that might roam throughout the entire hospital. They must always be able to reach their servers and data while maintaining the security of patient information. Retailers might have static proprietary endpoints running proprietary applications, or mobile tablets with a point-of-sale application. All these require different types of network support and perhaps different network security solutions. Is there any compliance checking needed for endpoints to ensure they meet company policies? (Location 741)
• Are the people who use this network interested in change, or resistant? If a new system is rolled out, will they take to it quickly or take months (or years) to develop an interest? Who are the influential users in this company, and who are the power users? These are the people that can tell you what changes are really needed. And these are the people you will want to include in a pilot of any new network technologies. How do users typically manage their data? Do most users take responsibility for their own data? You may need to design in some sort of network-based backup for users who do not protect or back up their data themselves. Do the users travel extensively or often work from home? How important is it to replicate the “in office” work environment while users are away from their office? How do people within the company communicate with each other and with external partners? How well is this working for them? (Location 760)
• Network management Modularity Simplicity (Location 842)
• Shortest Path First (SPF) runtimes (Location 867)
• If there were always enough bandwidth to transmit every packet offered to the network, there would be less need to control how traffic is transmitted. However, you might still have the problem of a large packet delaying the transmittal of a small packet, and thus introducing jitter into a real-time traffic stream. Additionally, people often forget that even the most granular link usage statistics are but an average. You can have microbursts of data that cause critical packets to be dropped but never show up in your network management reports. So no matter how big your pipe is, or how lightly used you think it is, it might save the day to have at least some basic QoS implemented. (Location 1863)
• All reachability (for both network nodes and end hosts) is learned in the data plane, rather than being carried through the network in the control plane. (Location 1896)
• mobility and loop-freeness are built on the back of data plane timers, rather than control plane convergence speed. (Location 1900)
• How could we make this problem easier to solve? By gathering each device in the network together by purpose or policy, so policies can be implemented along the edges leading to these groups of devices. (Location 2136)
• the right size for any given failure domain is never going to be the entire network (Location 2169)
• the right size for a given failure domain is always going to depend on advances in control plane protocols, advances in processing power, and other factors. (Location 2170)
• Over time, as technology improves, the optimal size for a single failure domain will increase. (Location 2174)
• as networks increase in size, the optimal number of failure domains within a single network will tend to remain constant. (Location 2175)
• Stretch, quite simply, is the difference between the optimum path through the network (for any pair of hosts) and the actual path through the network. For instance, if the shortest actual path available is 2 hops, but traffic is flowing along a 3 hop path, the stretch is 1. (Location 2268)
• Anytime you hide state you increase stretch. (Location 2275)