Small customer network

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This customer is a company with a network consisting of about 150-300 network devices and key servers. The purpose of this installation is to manage this customer network by alerting the operations staff to major failures.

The following sections describe this network in greater detail and provide suggestions for a Network Manager deployment to meet the needs of this network.

Description

The primary users of the product are the networking operations staff. All devices are in one location and managed by a small operations group of a few people. Network devices come from multiple vendors. A mixture of layer 2 and layer 3 network devices are present. Approximately 20 to 30 VLANs are defined. The network architecture is fairly flat and simple. All devices to be managed are located in the same network as the Network Manager system and have Fast Ethernet connections. Internet connections are passed through a firewall and access to the systems within the protected network is available through a company VPN. The network operations staff have clients attached by means of one of the following: a local LAN, WiFi connections, or by means of a VPN established by a telecommunications service provider. Network changes are made once a month and a new discovery is anticipated at this time.

Within this environment the following example conditions apply:

  • 3 active GUI clients.
  • Chassis ping polling at two-minute intervals. SNMP polling at 30 minute intervals. Typically three to 6 SNMP MIB values require polling.
  • No major Tivoli® products are integrated with the system, other than the required Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus.

Network Manager deployment

A single-server deployment is sufficient for this type of environment. In addition to the single-server deployment description provided elsewhere, the following deployment settings are appropriate for this type of environment.
  • A single network domain is sufficient for this size of network.
  • System can be any of the supported platforms. System requires 16 GB of memory, quad-core processor, and multiple physical disks in RAID 5 configuration.
  • Client system: single processor, 4 GB of memory, supported JRE and Internet browser
  • Default database used for the NCIM database.
  • A single ncp_poller polling engine is sufficient for this environment.
  • IPv6 dual stack support is required if workstations or network devices have IPv6.