This topic presents planning concepts. It is assumed that your network will be a converged network that combines voice, data, and video and that you have decided on one of network types discussed in the Internetwork Design Guide 
.
The primary planning considerations that drive the planning stage are: types of deployment, whether it will be a new installation, a migration to an installation with existing equipment, or an upgrade from a previous release to the current release; application availability based on your networking needs for multimedia and voice, security, redundancy, fault tolerance, and the costs associated with your needs.
Your goal is to minimize costs while delivering service that does not compromise established availability and performance requirements. These issues are essentially at odds. Any increase in availability and performance must generally be reflected as an increase in cost. As a result, you must carefully weigh the relative importance of resource availability, performance constraints, variables, and overall cost.
Note 
The concepts discussed in this topic are meant to be a high-level overview of considerations and are not meant to be a definitive set of rules.
The concepts that you should review are as follows: