Network Capacity Planning and Prediction Tools

Network Capacity Planning: Building Modern Networks is Complex

Just as an architectural engineer uses computer aided design (CAD) to design and test the strength of a skyscraper, network architects can design and test a complete IT network even before it’s actually built. Network capacity planning is a critical aspect of proper network architecture planning to ensure a healthy network has the growth capacity to meet future needs.

Network capacity planning can supply answers to network “what if” scenarios such as changes in the deployment of new applications and technologies, changes in traffic growth, data center consolidation and migration in multi-technology, multi-vendor networks.

 

Understand how it all works together with dependency mapping

“The more you use Riverbed, the more problems you’ll find it can help you quickly solve, leaving you more time for other tasks that you never seemed to have enough time for.” - John Zientowski, Network Engineer, Turner Broadcasting System

With SteelCentral network capacity planning tools, automatically discover infrastructure components and their dependencies to see how applications and infrastructure work together to deliver business-critical services across the network. You can keep track of the changing nature of these relationships with service maps as changes occur in today’s dynamic environments.

 

Predict the impact of proposed technology and network traffic changes

“I was seeing a quality of data from the box that I’d not seen before, and it was pretty easy to understand -- very straightforward compared to a packet decode, for instance. It’s 20 times easier to use than the other tools I’m familiar with. And it was a relief not to have to use 2 or 3 different tools to see what was going on." - Chris Reynolds, UK Network Manager, ALSTOM

Being able to accurately build a high-fidelity model for the behavior of the network, and be able to run these scenarios against the virtual network long before any changes are made in the physical network, allow you to minimize the risk from changes that could potentially make the network unstable, unresponsive – or worse – unavailable.