Overview
Understanding your LAN
Whether you wish to extend your Local Area Network (LAN), link multiple sites or install a converged network to support sophisticated collaboration and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, our network design engineers and network integration teams will happily assess your current and future needs, and deliver a solution ready for the way you want to do business. It’s what they love doing.
A key element of network planning is understanding your existing LAN infrastructure from physical, logical and performance viewpoints. A formal network assessment will report on your existing local and wireless network installation, documenting current network infrastructure, protocols, topology and other key aspects - always with your future requirements and business growth plans in mind. It’s the ideal starting point for a planned expansion.
Getting it right for you
Through our discovery services, we’ll report on device type, module type, serial number and software release version information. More detailed audit information, such as traffic analysis, network sniffing and configuration control can also be gained through our auditing service. We’ll explore your business network and proactively identify areas of risk, such as performance, security, obsolete equipment or outdated software. A discovery service we recently performed for one of our customers uncovered double the amount of network equipment that they had been aware of (put a smile on their faces, we can tell you). Simply contact us to find out more about your network. You’ll be amazed at what we can come up with.
Key features
- We offer skilled resources with industry recognised qualifications and accreditations as well as experience gained over 600 LAN projects.
- We maintain over a hundred CCIE (Cisco's highest level of professional certification), CCDA and CCNA certified engineers.
- We don’t just produce an inventory profile of your network; we provide you with our detailed analysis and recommendations.
- We’ve Cisco Gold accreditation to provide you with industry leading solutions.
Consider this product if...
- You need to refresh an existing network to support new applications such as IP Telephony, IP Video conferencing or collaborative networking.
- Your existing LAN has run out of capacity or no longer has the performance to support current and future applications.
- You’re consolidating or merging sites and you need to understand the status of different networks.
- You want a detailed picture of the security risks, potential causes of performance issues and obsolete hardware in your LAN.
- You want to know what’s running on your network and where equipment is located.
Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180
Features & Benefits
Lots of features and benefits to discover
Features:
- Your unique requirement - one of our friendly engineers will be in touch to assess exactly what you need and to determine how long it’ll take to carry out the discovery.
- Data capture and analysis – an equally friendly consultant will arrange a suitable date to visit your site and conduct the discovery, utilising non-intrusive tools to gather the information for analysis and to prepare your report with recommendations.
- Understanding the report – a meeting with our consultant to explore and fully understand the report..
- Future planning – once the report has been delivered and discussed with you, we’ll work with you to identify the next steps to ensure that your network is future proof.
Benefits:
- Support the strategy of IPT or advanced business application adoption.
- Pinpoint potential causes of capacity constraints.
- Identify obsolete devices or single points of failure that could lead to network downtime.
- Discover potential cost savings.
- Provide analytical data to support future planning.
- Enable the proactive management of your network, helping to eliminate any network interruption.
It’s great when a plan comes together. And we’ll make sure it does.
LAN audit service
Local features with wide-reaching benefits
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Features
- Requirements analysis and solution design
- Solution design and prototypingPre-delivery staging and detailed configuration
- Pre-delivery customer acceptance testing
- Legacy integration and migration strategies.
Benefits
- Specific to your needs - our audits are tuned to address your current environment and requirements, to ensure that the information and our recommendations address your specific area of concern.
- Planning support - the audit information and recommendations can be used to support future business planning.
- Proactive upgrades - the information provided supports proactive upgrades and can help to eliminate network interruption associated with reactive engineering.
- Post-project auditing - we also hold post-project audit consultations to address specific issues or to assist with future planning.
- Comprehensive - our assessment can include both the physical and logical network.
Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180
Detailed Info
Here’s how we go about it.
- One of our Data Services (DS) engineers will visit your premises and connect a PC running Cisco Network Collector to begin the discovery exercise.
- They will then upload the collected data to the Cisco Discovery Dashboard.
- A Cisco Inventory Profile Report (IPR) is then created.
- The IPR will then be analysed by a qualified consultant.
- The IPR with recommendations is compiled and presented to you.
To begin with, we’ll cover the logical network and its performance, including traffic types, network resilience and volumes as well as the physical network, including topology, rack layouts and the network devices deployed.
The information that our engineer gives you can then be used to:
- Provide the information necessary to understand the status of devices installed in the network, with particular reference to obsolescence and inconsistencies between devices that may affect network performance.
- Provide guidance on security vulnerabilities.
- Present information that can be used to plan future upgrades or migration strategies.
- Identify end-of-life hardware and software that’s no longer supported.
- Uncover network vulnerabilities and risks.
- Provide information to plan network upgrade or migration.
- Provide information to standardise on software and hardware platforms.
- Provide an opportunity to take stock of hard-to-trace assets.
How the LAN audit works
The aims of the audit are tailored to your exact requirements. Here are some of the things it’ll cover:
- Assessment objectives.
- Identify and eliminate capacity constraints.
- Identify and plan to eliminate security risks.
- Assess readiness to support IP Telephony and multimedia applications. Identify elements of the network that are nearing end of life or can lead to network downtime.
- Identify options for cost savings.Have analytical data to support future business planning.
By doing all that, we can ensure our LAN Design & Assessment services are exactly tailored to meet your current and future needs, regardless of whether you’re migrating to new systems and integrating with legacy infrastructure.
Conducting the audit
Your audit will be carried out by our Specialist Data Services Engineers. Once an Engineer has been assigned, they’ll work with you to complete a questionnaire that will capture details of your environment and ensure that the report will meet your needs. The Data Services Engineer will visit your premises and collect the input data required to conduct the audit using non-intrusive tools and visual inspection. The collected data is then analysed and the report prepared by the engineer at a Virgin Media Business location, thereby minimising the time required on site.
Recommendations
The report will identify potential risk areas as ‘warnings’ and make recommendations to alleviate any identified problems. As part of the audit, the Data Services Consultant can spend up to half a day with you working through the report, its conclusions and its recommendations.
Future planning
Once the audit report has been delivered to the customer, and its content reviewed and understood, our business solutions team can then engage with you to map out a future upgrade strategy.
Report delivery
You’ll receive a professionally bound and printed copy of the report as well as a copy on CD/DVD. Your Account Manager will then arrange the follow up meeting for our consultant to visit you and review the contents of the report.
That’s it, really.
Downloads
Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180
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