LAN Analysis
TNS provides a LAN analysis services to aid LAN administrators in determining the performance requirements for new LANs and evaluating the effectiveness of existing LANs in meeting the administrative and academic networking needs of their faculty, staff and, students. LAN performance is determined from traffic loads and LAN infrastructure components and topology. The process allows LAN administrators, who have intimate knowledge of the needs and expectations of their customers, a mechanism to have TNS help them in network resource planning and upgrading. A distinction is made between LANs under and not under TNS maintenance (see Procedure below). This service should be requested when the LAN administrator believes that the LAN is performing poorly based upon an outdated design or implementation. This service is not intended to address malfunctioning equipment; malfunctions, network failures, or outages should be reported to 865-4NOC for TNS-maintained LANs and to the departmental LAN administrator for LANs not maintained by TNS.
Procedure
- Document the reason for the LAN Analysis. The requesting unit will document the indicators that triggered the concern about LAN performance. If the unit is interested in eliminating a network deficiency or anomaly, the unit needs to provide a detailed description of the problem and information on the conditions under which the problem is observed. If the LAN analysis is requested for the purposes of network improvements or new LAN designs, the requesting unit must be prepared to discuss future needs such as servers, user patterns, future demand... This documentation will help to focus the subsequent data collection efforts.
- Document the Equipment Configuration. The unit requesting the LAN analysis must provide diagrams showing the currently installed equipment and topology. This documentation must include intra-switch uplink type, fiber or copper, and speeds. For multi-telecommunication closet installation, the location of switches must be provided. For TNS-Maintained LANs, these are the As-Builts, maintained by TNS Operations group. TNS will provide these on behalf of the customer. For non-TNS maintained LANs, the requestor must provide drawings and detail equivalent to that contained in TNS As-builts. This information can be obtained from a 3rd party if the customer contracts maintenance out to another group.
- Initial data analysis via SNMP data. TNS collects and maintains historical bandwidth utilization data for all IB uplinks, and for TNS maintained LANs, Inter-switch bandwidth utilizations. If appropriate, SNMP utilization data may need to be collected by a requesting unit with a non-TNS maintained LAN. This data is used to estimate traffic loads, and may be useful in narrowing down areas of concern. The requesting unit should be prepared to answer any questions as to what caused peak loads, and other anomalies found in the data collected. At the discretion of TNS, data collection may begin directly with step 4, below.
- Problem specific, real-time data collected with a packet analyzer. If deemed necessary by TNS, packet traffic will be captured by the requesting unit using TNSs RadCom Prism Lite packet Sniffer (or similar device provided by TNS). The requesting unit will develop the necessary Sniffer configuration file(s) and, in cooperation with TNS, specify data capture times, locations, and conditions. The requesting unit will capture and save the data. The data will then be provided by the requesting unit to TNS via FTP or removable data media for analysis by TNS.
- Historical and real-time data analysis. TNS will analyze the data and discuss the findings with the requesting unit, and others they invite to participate in any discussions.
- Additional data collection. The data collection process may be iterative as insight into network behavior is derived from the data.
- LAN administrator insight and experiences. The requesting unit may opt to modify the results to reflect known or predicted traffic patterns not represented by the collected data.
- Conclusions and Recommendations. Based upon the documented traffic patterns, TNS will make recommendations for LAN changes. Customers with TNS maintained LANs may request an estimate for the cost of implementing changes and submit a request to have the work completed by submitting a TSR.
