Network Planning

IT Guru® Network Planner automates analysis and planning of multi-technology, multi-vendor enterprise networks, supporting organizations to accurately plan for growth, change, technology migration, and new application deployment. It supports key initiatives such as:

• Unified communications including VoIP, IP telephony, multimedia conferencing, and telepresence
• VPNs and firewalls
• Data center migration and consolidation
• Disaster recovery and business contingency planning
• Transitioning to IPv6

Exclusive OPNET algorithms automatically optimize the network, in terms of capacity and configuration, to meet traffic growth projections, and achieve performance and survivability.

Enterprise network planners and operations engineers obtain significant return on investment from IT Guru Network Planner’s ability to rapidly roll out new applications, meet performance and availability requirements, and maximize existing network investments.

Inspect network utilization for current and future traffic demands, and identify bottlenecks and network vulnerabilities.

Key Features

• Plan for growth, projecting future traffic and right-sizing links and tunnels to meet service level objectives.
• Perform a predeployment analysis to accelerate deployment of new applications and technologies.
• Ensure network survivability, predicting the impact of failing nodes, links, or resource groups.
• Automatically design network topologies based on user-configurable priorities for cost, resiliency, and performance-related criteria.
• Optimize routing and security for virtual private network (VPN) environments including IPSec, DMVPN, VRF-lite and MPLS-based VPNs.
• Verify the impact of protocol tuning, QoS deployment, or traffic engineering
• Evaluate a wide range of “what-if” scenarios in a virtual network environment with full behavioral understanding of devices, protocols, and applications, without affecting the production network.
• Perform an automated VoIP Readiness Assessment, predicting the network Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for planned voice-over-IP services and automatically resizing link capacity as required.
• Plan for transition to IPv6 with the optional IPv6 Planning & Operations module. Automatically perform an IPv6 readiness assessment, and accelerate IPv6 migration planning.
• Validate the impact of configuration changes on network behavior and performance prior to deployment, leveraging the optional NetDoctor® module