Introduction
This report describes and compares the network designs of two organizations. The two organizations are from different fields and have nothing much common in them, but there are some similarities in the network design. Also, there are some differences as well. The paper explains the similarities and differences and covers the thinking involved behind the evaluation of the network requirements. Additionally, it also explains about meeting the requirements of a client. This paper is divided into different sections.
First section describes the background of two organizations and identifies their network requirements. Second and third sections describe the network design for both the companies. In the fourth section, the paper present a comparison of the two designs for similarities and differences.
Requirements
The network for two companies, the company details and their requirements are as follows:
ABCD Suppliers:
ABCD suppliers are a company specialized in mobility aids for elderly and disabled. The company has it headquarter in Surrey, several stores for sales and services across the country and a factory in Hampshire. The company needs to have an automated billing process at all its stores and needs to maintain a value chain where not only all the employees of the company but the customers are also involved in the chain of decision making. The company needs to have following specifications:
a. The company needs to have an online invoice system, that keeps track of all the purchases and sales being made for each store as well as a centralized invoice system. This will allow the company to analyze their business and make decisions appropriately (Cheswick, 2003).
b. The company needs to provide internet connectivity to all employees, so that they can work in a better way. This will allow the management to provide a better connectivity to the employees with each other as well they will be able to match with the speed of rising technology (Dehning & Stratopoulos, 2003).
c. The company needs to provide online services to its customers. This will give them a certain advantage over competitors as the reach of the company will increase.
d. Other applications include email service for all employees; file sharing, knowledge portals etc. (Forouzan, 2005).
Additionally, the network configuration for the placement of various servers is also essential for the network management of the firm. Company should also concentrates on how each employee would get connected to the network as well as how various offices will be connected to each other.
PQRS College:
A college specialized in further education and professional training in language, business, IT and management. This college has over 3000 students and 50 fulltime/ part-time staff members on 3 campuses across London. The college has several buildings, including administrative block, various departments and hostels. The college needs to connect these buildings as well as provide certain services. Here are the requirements:
a. Provide students, professors and employees with internet connection.
b. Allow them to share files.
c. Provide services like email etc.
Network design for ABCD suppliers
There are several stores of the company, with each store having approximately 15 computers. Also there is a headquarter having more than 100 computers. There is need to figure out a way to connect computers within a store or within headquarter (Forouzan, 2003). Apart from this, there is a requirement to connect all stores with each other and headquarter network.
Internal network of headquarter:
The Headquarter will have several departments and will be having a central server room. Different departments will be connected in star fashion to the central server room, by the use of Ethernet cables. This central will be connected to a gateway server and a router which will be linked to the ISP to provide internet connection (Jawadekar, 2002). Various application servers such as email, etc will be directly connected to the central server.
Within each department the computers will be connected using a bus topology, where a single bus will go across the department. Wi-Fi routers will be installed to provide wireless connectivity. This would depict as follows:
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Figure 1: Internal Network of Headquarter
The gateway server will also have a firewall implementation over it to prevent the network from intrusions. The router will maintain the addressing information of the network. File sharing will be enabled over the network.
Internal network of a store:
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Figure 2: Internal Network of Stores
Within a store the computers will be connected again in a star network to a single switch. This switch will be again connected to gateway with a firewall to prevent the network. This is depicted as follows:
Interconnectivity of stores and head Quarters:
This could be done by using a VPN. VPN refers to virtual private network. It creates a secure channel over the internet and allows access a remote machine from far distances over the internet. VPN comes with many distributions and also there is an open source distribution called Open VPN that could be used. The remote users will be connected to the network using VPN technologies.
Network design for PQRS College
The design of the network is completed in a number of phases; these phases develop the feature of the network one by one. The phases are:
Ø Connect the computers within a department and form five sub networks. This would contain wired as well as wireless networks. This would also include setting up resource sharing and file sharing over the network.
Ø Inter-Connection of the five sub networks to form the whole network. This would provide a central control over the whole network (Rose, 2003).
Ø Provide internet access to the network. This would also include setting up the firewall to prevent the network from outside intrusion and other attacks (Tanenbaum, 2004).
Ø Installation of network applications such as mail server, cache servers etc.
Ø Allowing remote users to connect to the network from outside (Stallings, 2006).
The detailed design of each phase is described below.
Connection of computers within a department:
Wired Connection:
All the computers will be connected through a wired LAN. There would be a central switch for every department through which other switches will be connected. Each switch will provide connections to a hall or a number of rooms. All these computers within a department preferably will be on the same subnet or two subnets may be created if the number of users in the departments exceed (Cheswick, 2003). The computers will be connected to the switches using star topology as this is more reliable topology.
Wireless Connection:
Apart from the Ethernet switches wireless access points will be placed inside the networks to provide mobility to the users. These will provide internet and LAN access in the pathways as well as in the halls. The wireless access points will be connected to a separate switch that will be connected to the department’s central switch (Dehning & Stratopoulos, 2003). This will make the network more dependent. In case the Ethernet LAN fails wireless would provide the backup and hence the LAN would be always working. The diagram given below shows the overall design within a department.
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Figure 3: Connections within a Department
Interconnection of departments:
Once the network has been setup inside each department, all the five departments need to be interconnected. This will be done by using a central switch that connects all the five department switches. The five departments will be connected in a star topology. Each department will have a separate set of IP’s. For example 1st department would have the network as 172.16.1.0 while the second would have 172.16.2.0 and so on, this would allow up to of 256 users under each department. Also more subnets could be added and the LAN could be expanded very easily (Forouzan, 2005). Each switch maintains the routing information of the sub networks and hence the machines to be accessed from other subnets. The following diagram shows the interconnection of departments.
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Figure 4: Inter-connection of department LAN’s
Providing Internet access to the network:
To connect the network to the internet, there is a need to connect the network to an ISP (Internet Service Provider). This will be done by using a gateway server between the ISP and the network (Forouzan, 2003). This gateway server will have an external IP as well as an internal IP; hence will have two Ethernet cards. All the requests will be sent through this server only. This gateway server will be connected to an internal router to maintain the routing information from inside the network (Jawadekar, 2002). A firewall will also be implemented over this gateway server to prevent the network from intrusions and other attacks. The gateway will be visible inside the network via the internal IP and outside the network via the external IP. Here is a diagram that shows the configuration.