You have obtained a contract position at a small marketing and advertising firm called the Colour Ability Corporation (CAC). Your contract responsibilities are to help them plan their emerging networking and communications requirements and update their IT resources. CAC currently hires 80 employees and operates from Level 10 and 11 on the X Tower in Brisbane CBD. CAC has recently purchased a four-story building in a Brisbane suburb where they can allocate a separate floor to each of their four departments, i.e., (1) marketing, (2) advertising, (3) design and photography, and (4) HR and accounting. They plan to move to their new office in three months. Also, CAC’s list of customers has greatly expanded to other cities, mainly Sydney where their customers in Sydney are demanding more interactive advertising media, including video presentations. The management recognizes the business potential in this new market in Sydney and have leased a small office in Sydney (aka CAC’s fifth department) to host 8 local employees.
They have hired you to review their existing IT resources and produce a proposal that allows the company to take advantage of their firm’s expansion. The management has stated that if the proposal meets their requirements, they may hire you full-time to implement and manage these new resources.
You now have an idea of the scope of the project that you have undertaken, but do not have all of the information required to proceed. Using the details provided in the following sections you are required to prepare a professional business report addressing the eight activities identified below.
CAC has provided a written summary containing floor plans for their Brisbane and Sydney offices, and notes from a verbal interview with the management team. Gather as much information as possible from these two sources to help you plan a technical solution for CAC’s networking and communications requirements.
After the equipment has been selected and the required services planned, the physical and logical installation is planned out. Physical installation includes the location of equipment and devices, along with how and when these devices are to be installed. In the business environment, it is important to minimize disruption of the normal work processes. Therefore, most installations, changes, and upgrades are done during hours when there is minimal business activity. Physical installation should also consider such things as adequate power outlets and ventilation, as well as the location of any necessary data drops.
All of the gathered information and the proposed technical solution must be assembled into a format that makes sense to the company who has asked you to provide a solution.
You are to prepare a formal proposal report for CAC that includes all the components listed above by detailing the equipment, management and security requirements for the above case study and justifying suitable technologies to enhance the business’s communications and networking within and outside the organisation. Be sure to include all cost information and network diagrams.
Background Information
The overall performance of an organization or a company can be enhanced by increasing its productivity by having quality network designs which works together the network devices which are of high quality and thus benefiting the organizations in so many ways (Merisa, 2017). The selected topology of the network will highly affect the availability, reliability and the performance of the network and thus if the selected topology is not the appropriate one to be used for implementation then we may expect to have a network that will fail in ensuring that network is well distributed and that the two features reliability and availability are well met in all ways (Bird, 2010).
The current space of Color Ability Corporation (CAC) for operation is not entirely enough at level 10 and level 11 towers in Brisbane Central Business District and thus due to their experience in advertising and marketing and having many new customers there is need for them to enlarge their current space and go somewhere else where they will operate freely.
The problem statement that need to be solved in this report is that CAC is moving to a new office in Brisbane which has a four floors and it is located in Brisbane Suburbs. There are some tasks that will be associated with the migration of the company to the new premises such as the design and implementation of the network infrastructure and how it will serve the entire organization without problems and meeting all their objectives.
The following are some of the major objectives that the IT specialist will be required to achieve for the smooth running of the organization when it comes to sharing of data and resources transmissions.
- A network infrastructure that is to be proposed should enable the employee to communicate effectively.
- The proposed computer system should be used by all.
- There will be need to buy at least three printers.
- Networking devices to be purchased should be only used in implementation of the network proposed.
When a system is laid down one will ensure that the project is a success whereby one can divide the project in to different modules just like it is done in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
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Phases
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Activity start date (2018)
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Duration
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Activity End Date(2018)
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Feasibility study
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10th October
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3
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12th October
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Project planning
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13th October
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10
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22nd October
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Project Design
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23rd October
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10
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1st November
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Implementation
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2nd November
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25
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26th November
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Project Testing
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27th November
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5
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2nd November
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System Documentation
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3rd November
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5
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4th November
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System Installation and Customization
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5th November
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2
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7th November
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Graphic device used in Graphic Production department
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Sydney and Brisbane Cities
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The component involved
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Minimum specifications and Recommendations
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Processor of the system
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Intel of about 3-4.0 GHz with an Expandable Turbo
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Memory capacity
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32 GB RAM which has expansion slot of up to 64GB
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Hard disk Drives
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2TB HDD which could be SATA SAN DISK.
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Compact Disk-ROM/Digital Video Disk
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DVD Recordable/Writable 24x
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The USB Ports
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8-18 ports, front-10, back-8
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Video Card
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NVidia 950G with up to 8GB
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Sound Card
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STX III ASUS essence
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Internal and External Modem
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Internal modem 10000 bps
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Operating System to be used
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Microsoft Windows 8 to 10 professional
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Screens
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Size-33 inches, Resolution-8K, rate of refreshing of up to 120 Hz
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Printer
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Kyocera Taskalfa 8052ci
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Speakers
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Dell External Speakers
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Internet Connection
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100-1000 Base-T Ethernet with up to 10G switch supplying the network all over.
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Graphic device used in Film Production department
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Sydney and Brisbane Cities
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The component involved
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Minimum specifications and Recommendations
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Processor
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Core i7 of 8th Generation with up to 3.8 GHz
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Memory capacity
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16GB RAM of DDR4
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Hard disk Drives
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1TB HDD which could be SATA SAN DISK.
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Compact Disk-ROM/Digital Video Disk
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DVD Recordable/Writable 24x
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The USB Ports
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8 ports, front-4, back-4
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Video Card
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NVidia 720 G with 4GB memory
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Operating System
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Microsoft Windows 10 professional of 64bits
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Screens
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Size-24-33 inches, Resolution-8K, rate of refreshing of up to 120 Hz
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Speakers
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External Speakers model HP 752701.
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Internet Connection
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100-1000 Base-T Ethernet with up to 10G switch supplying the network all over.
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Graphic device used in data center department
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Sydney and Brisbane Cities
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The component involved
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Minimum specifications and Recommendations
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Processor
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Core i5 to core i7 of 7th Gen to 8th Generation with a processor speed of up to 4.0GHZ if it is triggered.
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Memory capacity
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16 GB RAM
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Hard disk Drives
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10 TB HDD.
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Compact Disk-ROM/Digital Video Disk
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DVD R/W
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The Universal Serial Bus Ports
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8-12 ports, front-4, back-8
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Video Cards
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VisionTek Radeon 7750 SFF 1GB DDR3 5M VHDCI (4x DVI-D, miniDP)
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Sound Cards
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Asus STX II Essence
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Internal and External Modem
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Internal modem and external modem ranging from 10000 to 12000 bps
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Operating System to be used
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Microsoft Windows 10 pro
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Screens
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24`` Resolution-8K, Refresh rate-160 Hz
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Printer and scanners and Photocopiers
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Kyocera ECOSYS M8124cidn
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Speakers application
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External Speakers model HP 752701.
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Internet Connection
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100-1000 Base-T Ethernet with up to 10G switch supplying the network all over.
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In any company when it comes to printing then there is no comprimisation, as it will be done on daily basis and thus there will be need for CAC to have a multifunctional printer which will be able to perform all the specific tasks without technical issues in all manners. . The increment with number of clients working together with CAC has led them to migrate from their old office to a larger office and since they will be required to hire more people then there will be need to purchase quality and heavy duty multifunctional printers such as Kyocera Taskalfa 8052ci which is a multi-functional and multipurpose printer.
Objectives
Kyocera TASKalfa 8052ci is capable of doing duplex scanning and printing and at the same time it helps in improving the workflow as expected. It comes offers specifications of MFP which is uncompromising. It has a speed of printing of about 80 A4 or A3 per minute may it be colored or not colored. It can offer a maximum of about 7650 sheets capacity. Is has a fast performance as it is secured with an 8GB solid state drive and a Hard disk drive of about 320 Gb capacity which enables it to holds the printing speed even when one is printing high resolution images.
The managers in Brisbane will need a small printer which will cater for their office needs as recommended. The printer that will boost their work is that which has the ability to print colored pages, can print, scan and at the same time do copy. Another requirements that should be available one which will allow the manager to print double sided pages and of which the quality is very high (kyocera, 2017). The printer which will best serve is Kyocera ECOSYS M8124cidn which can print up 24 pages per minute. It is highly recommended in terms of power consumption as it saves energy and much more it is has components which are long life which are known for providing efficiency and reliability which is unprecedented.
The performance of the network will be greatly depend on the network devices kind, types and quality being used in the organization. When the devices of the network are good and of high quality there is an expectation to increase the overall performance and the business productivity. There are two major devices discussed in this concept namely the switch and the router. In this concept the company that will be selected for providing the router is Cisco which is known well for offering quality networking devices. Cisco Network Convergence System 5000 Series will be recommended to CAC to be used. This route is very intelligent in the manner that it is able to detect and filter anything which is suspicious from the traffic that gets in or go out of the network by either allowing or blocking it before it enters to the internal network (Cisco, 2016).
Cisco Meraki MS225-48 Switch should be recommended to the CAC management when network is set up. The reason for its recommendation is because it has 48 ports which have crossover which are Auto-MDIX and can supports all the BaseT Ethernet connections from10/100/1000 respectively (Cisco, 2018).
- It applies the 802.3 security standards and can be used in supporting the power over the Ethernet within its 48 ports.
- Another feature of this switch is that it’s may be used in supporting remote management through the dashboard of Meraki which is known for being user friendly and much more very efficient when it comes easy to use.
- There are other features such as dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP), hostnames which can be applied fingerprinting, remote diagnostics and notification alerts which are done via the email and the SMS.
- The above feature helps in ensuring that there is high performance of the network through which the flow can control support and thus helping in the switching capacity.
Phases
WAP (Wireless access points) can be used in facilitating the connection of wireless connections to the devices of the employees such as the smartphones, Laptops and tablets among others. In this case since CAC has limited resources and a constrained budget it will be recommended for them to use Cisco Business 100 series.
Cisco Business 100 series WAP installation is very easy as the setup wizards for integrations and web based setup intuitive are already configured for you. It has a very high speed connection as it uses the security standards of about 802.11ac/n which may help in improving the range and the productivity.
Backup Server.
A backup server will be required in the institution as in case there is a problem with the system in the entire network then it will not affect the backup server which could be set somewhere it is not easily accessible. Film and graphic department is a field that really need a lot of storage and space as each and every day they must capture and store all what they have captured.
Backup Server consists of lot of space may be 200TB which is used by the Film crews for backup. The backup may not applied immediately but it may be applied in future may be when a file misses or when there is a system failure. The backup server can only be accessed by the Admin and incase the employees will need access then the admin has to give them the rights with close supervision to what they are doing.
Three-layered hierarchical design will be appropriate for this system in that it will help the devices to perform effectively. This model ensures that the network is divided in to three major layers namely
Some of the benefits that will be associated with network design models are such as scalability, redundancy, performance, security and manageability.
Distribution layer is used for aggregating the data from access layer. Core layer is responsible for the high speed which is used in switching the networks. This layer is the one that have the different switches that are used for offering high bandwidth. The following figure shows a sample of what is expected in the network topology of CAC.
When a network is set, the next phase is to get the internet connection. The company has to select the best provider who will give them the best services with considering their set budgets and thus helping them in determining the performance of the overall network in terms of the speed of the network. The internet’s service provider should be in a position to help on assuring that there is high availability that there will be always minimal or at no cases of downtime experienced in the organisation with regards to the internet.
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ISP
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Features
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Cost ($)
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Technical Capabilities
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Modem fee of $150
Activation and installation fee of $200
Broadband is unlimited
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200
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Upon signing the Foxtel broadband and the Environment bundles one will get a stress free connection which has a dedicated squad.
Foxtel don't supply cable broadband.
Minimum speed for watching in Foxtel is about 3.0mbps for the Standard definition and About 7.0 Mbps for the High Definition.
When video streaming Foxtel is unmetered.
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Internet speed is premium
Subscription fee of about 200$ which reduces up to $0 after 3 years
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90
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It is flexible and scalable.
Vodafone commits about 99.5 % of its uptime with respect to the Customer’s service each time.
There is port freedom in Vodafone unlike in Foxtel. It has a 3rd party router which uses PPPoE.
Once can be able to forward the router ports to a computer on the network.
Easy to establish a wireless connection to the internets and thus helping one to optimize the WI-FI signals.
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Graphic Device Used in Film Production Department
CAC can apply some services which will help in increasing the productivity of the organisation internally. Some of the services are explained below.
This is a service that uses the application server device in offering the management and centralization of the application in the administration
This service uses the mail server in sending and receiving of emails in CAC Company. The idea that CAC has sales, marketing and advertising departments there is expectation of emails to be sent and received across all the departments.
This is a service that uses the file server which has centralized storage which is used for sharing the files and ensuring all the staff having access in completing and updating the files at all times.
This is a service that uses a dynamic host configuration protocol in allocation of IP addresses to the users thus dynamically enabling them in accessing the internet and other resources used in the network.
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Requirement Question
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The Number and reason Justifying that
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Any need for Wired connections?
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There is need of wired connections in about 200 in number shared between the two regions so that the workstations, printers and laptops used by the users can easily share resources and communicate easily. (Gorges, 2017).
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Are wireless connections required?
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Wireless connections will guarantee the people can connect to the network using their smartphones, laptops etc. there will be 160 connections needed for each and every Wireless Access Point.
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What are the recommended Wireless standard for the WAP to be applied?
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802.11ac is the recommended security standard as it is very stable, reliable and thus very secure.
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Is there a need for a firewall?
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Yes it will be needed as it will be protecting the network from the traffic attacks and any malicious (Kuipers, 2016).
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Will ISP be required in connections of the internet?
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For providing the connections of the internet to the company.
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Are there any types of ISP connectivity’s?
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DSL connection is the recommended because of its stability, speed, and minimal downtime.
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Is there need for any internal or even an external modem?
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External and internal modems will be used in improving the network performance and connectivity.
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Are cables required?
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Recommended cable is Cat6e which is used for internet connections and network connections.
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Will there be need for a backup battery?
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Yes as it will help in preventing the power surge that damages the network devices which are connected to the power surge and thus this may help them in completing their work and save (Shin, 2010).
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Activity Eight
There are so many situations when the company may opt to use both the public and the private IP as it enhances the security of the network as it shields the private access of the IP from the outsiders. People will only see the public Ip when devices are connected to the internet and cannot use it to trace the private IP thus making the network more secure (Yang, 2014). This will help CAC maintain data security and ensure that they are not accessed by unauthorized users from external networks. Thus, CAC should use both private and public IPs in order to make the network more secure and prevent external attackers such as hackers from gaining access to the internal network.
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No
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Item
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Quantity
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Budget ($ dollars)
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1
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Personal Computers
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100
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14000
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2
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Graphics Production Personal computers
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6
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4000
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3
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Film Production Personal Computers
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4
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4500
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4
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Servers
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8
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4800
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5
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Wireless Access points
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10
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4000
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5
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Cisco Routers
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3
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3500
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7
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Kyocera and HP Printers
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3
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6000
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8
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Cisco Switches
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8
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4000
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9
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Vodafone ISP
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1
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600
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Total Estimated Cost
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45,400 Dollars
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The growth of CAC in the next 10 years is expected be rapid in the next five years and thus the expected network design is required to cater for the concept of flexibility that will help in allowing future extensibility and scalability. As the network will be increasing thus the proposed network design should be set in a manner where it will accommodate all the users without affecting the network infrastructure and the performance. If CAC would consider the proposed design, then it will have a benefit of extending its network in an easy way if there is need be.
Conclusions
On the basis of the justifications given and provided, it will suitable for CAC to adopt the design which has been proposed and the network infrastructure to the Brisbane New building. The performance of the network will entirely depend on the network choice, cables used and the ISP vendor. There are some several key network determinants which help in designing a quality network with good performance overall such as the reliability, Extensibility, availability and security. On the basis of the mentioned determinants the discussed and proposed network devices will help in ensuring that the requirements of CAC are met.
References
Bird, H., 2010. ICT pearson Introduction. Network components and the associated devices, 3(1), pp. 12-19.
Cisco, 2016. Cisco Network Convergence System 5500 Series. [Online] Available at: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/network-convergence-system-5500-series/index.html[Accessed 16 October 2018].
Cisco, 2018. Cloud scale for metro aggregation and data center networks. [Online] Available at: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/network-convergence-system-5000-series/index.html[Accessed 16 october 2018].
Gorges, l., 2017. communications and Networking. Algorithms of Network survival, 1(1), pp. 2-16.
Kuipers, H., 2016. computer applications Journal. designing and implementing the firewall system, 4(1), pp. 12-18.
kyocera, 2017. ECOSYS M8124cidn. [Online] Available at: https://www.kyoceradocumentsolutions.co.za/index/products/product/ecosysm8124cidn.html[Accessed 16 October 2018].
kyocera, 2018. TASKalfa 8052ci. [Online] Available at: https://www.kyoceradocumentsolutions.co.za/index/products/product/taskalfa8052ci.html[Accessed 16 October 2018].
Merisa, B., 2017. Puget Systems. [Online] Available at: www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Specs-Explained-Video-Card-463
[Accessed 16 October 2018].
Shin, Z., 2010. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking,. Cooperative Carrier Signaling: Harmonizing Coexisting WPAN and WLAN Devices., 20(3), pp. 400-429.
Yang, W., 2014. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management. Technological position in alliances network., 26(6), pp. 26-29.
