Small Network Growth

Growth is a natural process for many small businesses, it must grow up with the passage of time. Many of larger companies start as small companies. The world-leading Microsoft company start with two persons.  A strategic plan will help you to grow your company. Ideally, the network administrator has much time to make smart decisions about increasing the network in sequence with the growth of the company. To balance a network and take a decision the below elements are used to scale a small network into a large network.

Network documentation – diagram of the physical and logical topology

Device inventory – The list of devices included in the network

Budget - itemized IT budget, including fiscal year equipment purchasing budget

Traffic analysis - protocols, applications, services and their respective traffic requirements e.g. bandwidth and disk/storage capacity should be documented a planned.

Network segmentation requirements. Based on performance, Security, Management, and availability requirement.

Protocol Analysis

When a network is growing, it is important to understand the type of traffic that will be crossing the network including current traffic flow. If the types of traffic are not known; a protocol analyzer can help recognize the traffic and its source. During peak hours try to capture the network traffic to find out the traffic types. Also, perform capture on different network segments for better understand. The figure below illustrates the network analyzer for different segments.

The protocol analyzer is analyzing the bases of its source and destination as well as the type of traffic being sent. The analysis can be used to make decisions on how to manage the traffic efficiently when relocating a server. 

Employee Network Utilization

When the network is growing, it is very necessary for a network administrator to understand; how network usage is going to change.

In addition to understanding changing traffic trends, a network administrator must also be aware of how network use is changing. The small network administrator has the capability to get  “snapshots” of employee application utilization for an important portion of the employee workforce time to time. These snapshots may contain information about:

• Operating system and its Version


• Both Network and Non-Network work application


• CPU, Drive and RAM Utilization