Network Design Considerations › Conceptual Specification

Conceptual Specification

This section describes how to create a conceptual specification for a CA IDMS DDS network.

Analyze the organization

The initial conceptual specification for a network should be removed from CA IDMS DDS design and implementation considerations. The conceptual specification should fall naturally from the way the organization handles information.

Since the primary requirement for a sound conceptual specification is knowing the organization's information requirements, an organization may decide to coordinate this phase of network design with business analysts, who may not know a great deal about computers, but do know the organization.

Take the following steps to create a conceptual specification:

1. Identify and examine applications; also, develop a catalog of software components.
2. Identify and examine databases, both existing and potential.
3. Define security requirements for databases.
4. Analyze and evaluate hardware configurations and data communications facilities.

As the following illustration shows, steps 1, 2, and 3 define the logical network, and step 4 defines the physical network. The conceptual specification of a network is based on the analysis of both the logical and physical networks.

These four steps are discussed separately as follows.

┌─────────────────────┐ -─┐
│                     │   │
│  Define processing  │   │
│     requirements    │   │
│                     │   │
│                     │   │
└─────────────────────┘   │
┌─────────────────────┐   │
│                     │   │
│   Define database   │   │   Logical
│     requirements    │   ├── network
│                     │   │   design
│                     │   │
└─────────────────────┘   │
┌─────────────────────┐   │
│                     │   │
│   Define security   │   │
│   requirements for  │   │
│      databases      │   │
│                     │   │
└─────────────────────┘ -─┘
┌─────────────────────┐ -─┐
│                     │   │
│   Define hardware   │   │   Physical
│  configuration and  │   ├── network
│ data communications │   │   design
│      facilities     │   │
└─────────────────────┘ -─┘