Network design Project

Background

High-Power Consultants is a mid-sized business that offers computer and network consulting services to a variety of companies throughout the southeast United States. They have recently been retained by Joe's Yachts to develop a network design upgrade proposal that follows industry standard guidelines.

Joe's Yachts is a seller of high-end and custom yachts to customers throughout the southeast coastal area. They have 15 stores in four states and all are interconnected. Your instructor will provide you with the current network layout of Joe's Yachts. Although the current infrastructure provides basic network services and interconnectivity between all stores, it has nonetheless been hampered by older technology and designs. Joe's Yachts would like to upgrade its network design and components to improve network capacity, provide wireless services at their stores, offer more robust security services, and implement store-to-store VoIP services to replace the existing traditional phone service. As an employee of High-Power Consultants, you will develop a proposal for Joe's that follows the SDLC process and meets their network design requirements.

Computer network planning for Joe's Yachts consists of the following steps:

1. Identifying the applications that you intend to use: Computer networking may be required diverse environments such as Enterprise Resource Management (ERM), Internet telephony, Instant Messaging (IM), eMail and others. It is important to discuss the applications that you intend to use such as the above. These in turn are used for estimating the software, hardware, and traffic requirements.

2. Traffic Requirements: Computing traffic requirements include several factors. A few points to consider include the following:

Identification and documentation of major traffic sources.

Categorization of traffic as local, distributed, client/server, peer-to-peer, terminal/host or server/server.

Estimation of bandwidth requirements for each application.

Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for each application

Reliability requirements.

3. Scalability Requirements: Scalability refers to the extent of network growth that should be supported. For corporate network, scalability is a major consideration. Provision must be made to add users, applications, additional sites, and external network connections.

4. Geographical considerations: Consider the LAN and WAN links that may be required. Offices that are separated by large distance (for example one in Delhi and another in New York) can be linked together by a WAN (Wide Area Network) link. Similarly, building complexes within a compound can be linked by a LAN (Local Area Network) link. Typically, the LAN links are high bandwidth (10Mbps and above) and WAN links are of lower bandwidth (64 Kbps - 2Mbps). Further, the LANs fall within the premises of a Company whereas WANs are typically leased and maintained by the Telecom. Hence, WANs are costly in bandwidth terms and need to be planned and designed with utmost care to minimize resource consumption.

5. Availability: The availability of a network needs to be given careful consideration while designing a network. It is the amount of time a network is available to users over a period of time and is often a critical design parameter.  Availability has direct relation with the amount of redundancy required. Another important factor that needs ...