Chapter 2. Analyzing Technical Goals and Constraints

This chapter provides techniques for analyzing a customer's technical goals for an enterprise network design. Analyzing your customer's technical goals can help you confidently recommend technologies that will perform to your customer's expectations.

Typical technical goals include scalability, availability, performance, security, manageability, usability, adaptability, and affordability. Of course, there are tradeoffs associated with these goals. For example, meeting strict requirements for performance can make it hard to meet a goal of affordability. The section, "Making Network Design Tradeoffs," later in this chapter discusses tradeoffs in more detail.