Solution Design Principals

by [Profile] | Monday, January 31st, 2011

After looking back on some projects we have completed and looking foreward to our 2011 goals I thought it prudent to go into some detail about our solution design principals. These principals are relevant to any technology project and choosing how to empasize each one is critical to acheiving project goals.

1. Functionality
Does the design include all the feature sets required to acheive your goals? Quite simple really but very fundamental, there is no point initiating a project if it will not deliver the required feature sets to the end user.

2. Flexibility
Is it easy to modify your solution design? How much flexilibity do you need? This is all relative of course but a great example of this is deploying a Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Server for remote app, printing inside the LAN is easy you just print direct to the printer. How about users accessing the RDS from the WAN, how will they print? Windows 7 will in most cases support printer redirection pretty smoothly, but in Windows XP you may find yourself without the flexibility to acheive this.

3. Security
This has a checklist unto itself really, but it is none the less a critical factor to consider.

4. Manageability
How manageable is your solution? This is a key design principal for us. We opperate a small team releative to how many end users and devices we directly support. Ensuring opperating systems meet the requirements for group policy you wish to apply, how about server management and patch management, switch and router management.

5. Performance
Often a key goal is performance in any project. From and end users or company directors point a view, no IT project is worth it if performance is not significantly improved from an existing solution. The view of a user is that the more something costs the faster it should be. Again though, performance is relative. This is a particularly difficult objective to meet when your project involves WAN links and remote offices. A lot of the time in our projects, performance is estimated based off our experience.

6. Reliability
This is a 2 fold principal, firstly any solution should be reliable without question. But secondly, ‘uptime’ can be maximised by employing a fault tollerance into design. This is a particular area we specialise in, fault tollerant routers, core switching and server clustering enable us to eliminiate hardware failure as a potential solution buster.

7. Scalability
Deploying a hardware set to meet imediate goals is usually the most economical method but what about a growth plan. If you deploy a server and it’s opperating near capacity how do you extend its capacity? Deploying a WSS solution, be aware of its item limitation, at what point will it not meet your requirements. This often directly impacts performance goals.

8. Economy
This is the hardest one of all. To determine the economy of a project obviously you must consider costs but also estimates on what saving will be made my meeting relability and performance targets aswell as better functionality saving in end users time.

In my expereince these 8 principals have been key to solution success. I have seen plenty of deployments not meet these goals and while the end result may still be successful, in a weeker design it is usually the ecomonomic factor that suffers the hardest.

Tom Berryman
IT Systems Engineer
Connectivity IT


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