Patent ID: 6857014

Claim:
A method of designing a network for a network client, comprising the steps of: receiving desired client reliability parameters associated with a service agreement; receiving product information on a network, which has a plurality of nodes and links; providing said product information to a product-integrity model and producing product-integrity parameters for said network; said product-integrity parameters comprising one or more of service-affecting failure rate, service failure duration, fault detection coverage, unplanned and planned maintenance actions, equipment fault isolation, mean-time-to-repair, percent defective software loads or percent failed software load insertions; based on said product-integrity parameters, producing network-integrity parameters for said network; said network-integrity parameters comprising one or more of link and node restoration time, network fault recovery coverage, network failure containment or network fault isolation; based on said product-integrity and said network-integrity parameters, producing support services-integrity parameters for said network; said support services-integrity parameters comprising one or more of: support availability, support responsiveness, fix responsiveness, or fix quality; based on said product-integrity, network-integrity and support services-integrity parameters, producing actual client-reliability parameters for said network; and based on said actual client-reliability parameters, determining whether said service agreement is achieved in said network; said support services-integrity parameters are selected from the group consisting of support availability, support responsiveness, fix responsiveness, and fix quality.