Designing A Scalable Communication Network For A Biomedical Development Company Essay.

Background

A private biomedical development company (5 Star) is located in 2 adjacent three-story buildings. It developed software for programming machines which it has built and sold for many years. They plan to develop a web version of their machine. Each building is approximately 50 metres long and 15 metres wide. They are set about 40 metres apart. The company needs your expertise to upgrade their existing network. Their current network is old and will need to be replaced. The managing director has asked for a “software development company of the future, using the latest technologies with a network which can accommodate the load now and for another five years”.

The 5star company has currently 250 employees with only two dedicated computer rooms each with 10 computers and printers. Most employees work in production and do not need computers.

A computer room is in one building (software development) while the other computer room (technical development) is in the other building. The network was installed in 2011. Network operating system is Windows Server 2008. The network is simple hub and switch connected to the server.

There is one router connected to each of these two servers. There are also 20 computers in second building for administrative staff again with a hub, switch and server and they use the same router. There are three LANs all connected to the one router. Employees cannot log in using their laptops. It is a very simple network.

The software development company of the future will have all software developers issued with Laptops/iPads and all the desktop computers have been removed from the new software development lounge area. There will be now two computer rooms each with 20 computers one for Software Programmers and the other for Multimedia/Web Designers. The company plans to make virtual machines to be delivered online as well as their current machines. The production will need 60 new computers to control the 3D printers. There will also be 60 new computers in the admin building.

One building will have computer room for software programmers and web designers, the second building will have a computer room for technical department and the business employees. The software developers, technical department and company employees each form communities of users with different needs and loads on the network. This understanding of communities of users is a key part of your assignment.

This company also needs to connect with a WAN at a branch office which has just been opened. There will be 100 computers in branch office and videoconferencing is vital for success. This branch is located approximately 200km from this private software development company. They need to be linked to the existing software development company network. This is a case for understanding distance remote situations for WAN.

Important objectives of the Future Network:

The two main objectives for the proposed solution are:

• A modern network for the company and

• To ensure that these company has videoconferencing between the main office and their branch.

The network is proposed to achieve the above objectives considering the company’s following business and technical goals.

Business goals:

• Improved communications, wireless, videoconferencing, etc.

• Spare no expense,

• Protect company information,

• The company of the future will have over 500 employees,

• Be excellent in technology.

Technical goals:

• The current network, computer rooms are to be upgraded to a modernnetwork (campus design) to meet developers and employee’s needs,

• Scalability – remember they plan to double in size,

• Availability – Wireless network access is available in all employees as well as some outdoor areas for software developers and employees,

• Employees have access to company resources from both company and home (different servers),

• Performance – network performance must be high,

• Reliability – no single point of failure,

• Security – protection of company information and other IT assets,

You are required to design the network you would recommend and how it would be configured. Remember the goal of building a new network is that it will support the company’s needs for the next five years. Your recommendations are to be submitted as a formal report containing your analysis of the present situation, and your recommended network solution.

For part 1 report, you are required to:

• Analyse user network requirements

• Describe and analyse the current network

You will need to make a number of assumptions (see below) regarding the existing organisational structure including management hierarchy, software, hardware, circuit, user communities and network use patterns , etc. which will need to be documented in the appropriate sections of your report.

Employees form communities of users based on their roles.

You will need to identify all the circuits (cabling) and network hardware of the existing network(s) and explain their function, performance, capacity, etc. You will need to include both logical and physical network diagrams for the current network. You will also need to provide a layout of your software development company showing where your network devices are located. Presentation is important. No marks are allocated to referencing, however, you are strongly encouraged to do so if relevant.

You are required to design the network you would recommend and how it would be configured. Remember the goal of building a new network is that it will support the company needs for the next five years. Your recommendations are to be submitted as a formal report containing your analysis of the present situation and your recommended network solution.

Background

With the Ever growing need for expansion for a company facilities, the new branches and even other departments within the organization will demand for more stable, effective, efficient and reliable communication network so as to take full advantage of the growing business demands and also for them to be in a position to deliver in a timely and efficient manner to their clients. Our purpose is to integrate a system meeting the organization growing need by providing a stable and up-to date communication network.

The Bio-medical company has been developing software for the company whose communication network and software is outdated, these current system need to be upgraded as the communication network they are using is out of service and need to upgrade. We have to come up with a networking structure that will handle the new software from the development company and to be able to handle the huge load and allow for scalability in a situation the company expands to open up more markets outside the current building they are in as well as even departmental expansion within the company.

This project intends to come with a better communication system for the Company; we intend to come up with a system that is scalable to allow for the company expansion in future. We want to seal all the weaknesses presented by the current system in place and to achieve improved efficiency and effectiveness in running the companies daily activities as well as to propel the company to achieve the set goals. we will analyze the current network bandwidth performance and financial perspective in terms of the cost and how the new system will help the company save on the cost either in service delivery or the cost cutting that these communication system will bring by allowing handling of many clients in a short span of time as well as being efficient, the system will help us also save on cost of doing business and meeting organizational needs. The system to be implemented will have to be in line with the latest technologies in the market and also should be flexible to allow for future technological advancement so that the software would not be meaningless.

The communication network system is intended to handle the increasing departments and branches for the company. The network should be able to handle the increasing demand in the company as well as should be in a position to support the software upgrade to be done for the company system. The system should be in a position to handle these loads within the shortest time possible. We have to carry out an overhaul of the design since the current system is outdated, the hardware in place have been outdated as well as the software in place.

We need to build a network design that needs to always be up, even in the event of failed link, failure in equipment or in a situation we experience an overload. The network should deliver application and provide short response time between the different hosts. The network should be easy to modify, trouble shoot and should be secure so as to protect the data that connect to  it. It should also allow for growth so as to adapt any business changes.

Scope

Organization structure

The company we are designing the network for has a total number of employees distributed in the 5 divisions in the company. We have to analyze the requirements to sort these people as well as we have to consider the future employees yet to join the company and the expansion of the company as they may increase the departments in the company as it grows. The network design of this company is as shown in details in appendix A(Meghanathan, Nagamalai and Chaki, 2013).

In the design of this network we will implement Hierarchical Network Design. This design is used to group the devices in the network into groups in a network. The networks are organized into three layers

• Core layer:-connects layer that are distributed in the network
• Distribution Layer:-interconnects the networks that are smaller
• Access Layer:-provide connectivity from the network servers to the end users (Meghanathan, Nagamalai and Chaki, 2013).

Advantages

• Ease of Design
• Traffic Multiplexing
• Equipment Cost Savings
• Security

The company main aim in setting up these networks is to understand the customer business goals and constraints. By analyzing the changes in business strategies and networking benefits to the business goals here are some of the crucial goals that need to be achieved

• An increase in the company revenue and profits
• The market share of the company needs to grow since we are implementing the most current network system.
• The competitive advantage for the company need to improve compare to the companies in the same market with the one we are upgrading the network for.
• The new network design should offer new customer service and better customer supported.

With the new network there should be minimal disruption caused by either the network disruptions happening or by the network security problems since we are using the modern technology which has been designed to counter the natural and man-created barriers.

The network design for the company apart from being reliable, efficient and effective, it should also achieve the following Technical goals;

• Improved Security of the network:-the company needs to implement a good firewall or intrusion detection system to ensure that the internal operations of the company are safe guarded against the intruder.
• Network Performance:-the company while designing the new network need to ensure that the connectivity to every node in the network is super fat so as to increase on the performance at the access layer and hence achieve efficiency and being effective in service delivery.
• Network Availability:-when setting up the company network we need to factor in the network redundancy features. We may implement a redundant trunk link in between switches and routers such that in case we experience failures in any of the links created it would not have any significant Impact on the entire network.
• Easy Network Management:-the network to be designed need to be easy to deal with in a situation a problem arises. The organizations technical goal is to provide a network that is less costly to trouble shoot and to fix errors arising.
• Network Scalability:-the company over time will grow and will need to be networked to accommodate the expanding branches or departments or even merging with another companies, we should be able to design a network that should be scalable and be able to support new users, connections and more others so that we don't keep spending a lot of money setting up a new network to accommodate expansion.

The company application of this network design will be determined by the geographical location of the central office and the other facilities we are suppose to network with and considering their distance since these are what determines the proper choice of the infrastructure to use for the Company network.

For these network set up the employee suppose to handle is approximately 250 and they are distributed in the five departments. From the Knowledge of the expected users it will help us deliver an efficient network design, know of the server locations and the infrastructure we are going to use for communication and in these case the servers will be at the central location, for network communication we are going to implement the WAN network topology for access away from the central office and the outside world/customers as well as the LAN topology for internal communication in the company.

Hardware

As for the companies approximately 250 employee we need to have facilities for them to use to access the company data via communication network that we have designed for the company. The company employee need to have facilities such as portable data capture devices, laptops and any portable device that is more flexible for use as the network we will implement will allow for flexibility rather than the present which confines a user to the same work station. The network will even allow the user to work from home hence increasing the company productivity. The devices also should be fast (Oppenheimer, 2011).

The server we will use for this company will be outsourced online so that we are assured of server security, reliability and availability. If we host the server in a place it won’t be secure since we have to protect it from bugler, also it will be reliable since power loss is an issue when we host it locally as we will require a standby generator which is a very expensive investment.

Objectives and Goals

We will install windows to the client’s laptops and computers since it provides better hardware support and it will help us easily achieve the company’s goal. The cost of installing these software is way much minimal hence advantageous for the company in cutting the cost of implementation.

Windows Operating system provide desktop productivity which is highly recommended, it comes with office suite which entails word processing, spreadsheet, charting, presentation and database services (MySQL).the cost of acquiring is minimal since its installed on the server and the terminal who are the employees are able to access remotely hence no cost having to buy licenses for each and every employee in the company.

The Company requires a server to host the application being used by the employee for data entry and file sharing. The server also allows us to communicate with the centralized data storage. The applications need to be able to support information sharing and provide services to other applications in the standard protocol like SOAP in the right format of XML. The application Hosted on the server will utilize the communication network that we have settled up as well as the employee will utilize the network while communicating with the server application, posting and retrieving data and even accessing the files made available to them. Server maintenance will be so easy to implement and maintain because once you have made changes t server application we deploy to the terminal who are the user without having to manually configure the employee computer one by one (Oppenheimer, 2011).

the reason for WAN Topology being implemented for the company is because it allows for employees access the company resources remotely without having to be physically in the central office, these allows for remote working hence cutting the company the cost of having to invest in office space. Also it allows for efficiency in service delivery as the employee can easily handle task extended from office and extend till home.

Wan Topology also allows for flexibility and reliability. For this company we will implement redundancy in terms of service providers so that we minimize on the time our service delivery is down. When one provider is unable to provide the services automatically we use the other one hence encouraging business continuity (Oppenheimer, 2011).

In the Company Head offices building we will set up LAN to enable the employees in various departments to have access to the server services. we will pull wired connection to each terminal, besides that we will also set up wireless access points to be used in case the cables experiences issues, this is part of network design procedure to ensure that we achieve optimum operation as well as performance goal for the company(Kurose and Ross, n.d.).

The company intention is to have the data and documents centralized so that it is easily accessible to its employee and their customers and to avoid data redundancy which will compromise on the efficiency and to avoid having to maintain same data in many locations.

For the company data not to be compromised through unauthorized access to the client systems either through spyware or virus intrusion we recommend that we install an antivirus to counter the virus issue and as for a person impersonating we need to train the employees on the importance of keeping their password secure and not disclosing to anyone. Employees need to change passwords t given intervals and also a rule on the kind of password the user will be using needs to be set so as to eliminate weak passwords which can easily be infiltrated through the use of dictionary attack. Suggestions for the anti viruses we can implement include Kaspersky and NORTON(Network Security Plus, 1995).

Online Security

The company needs to secure the software installed in their remote server so that it locks out those trying to intrude into the system. Security will start from the employees end all through to the network implementers setting up a firewall to lock out unauthorized users, besides that we need also to have an intrusion detection system that detects any intruder into our system and be able to raise an alert to the company security team with specification of the area the attack came from in the system. we need also to make choice of the best browsers to access the resources, in our case we choose chrome and then we create certificates for access so that those without certificates are automatically locked out of the system(Kurose and Ross, n.d.).

With the current set up, maintenance and support is so costly and less efficient since it involves an IT personnel going round sorting out each and every computer for the employees. with the current system any update done at the server end is deployed to all the employees in the company thanks to the new network design that will ensure effectiveness and efficiency in maintenance and support. Support time has been minimized by a huge margin reducing the time wastage attending to each and every client by the company IT specialists.

Conclusion

A good network design is the one that satisfy the following; availability, efficiency, effectiness, fast performance and the reliable network. Redundancy of the network really help in a case one link is down the others will be in operational hence the company’s business will not be compromised at any one time. The network security as well is crucial as we need to safe guard the data for the company so that the competitors will not be able to gain access and take advantage of the company.

References

Kurose, J. and Ross, K. (n.d.). Computer networking.

Oppenheimer, P. (2011). Top-down network design. Indianapolis, Ind.: Cisco Press.

Network Security Plus. (1995). Network Security, 1995(4), pp.6-7.

Meghanathan, N., Nagamalai, D. and Chaki, N. (2013). Advances in computing and information technology. Berlin: Springer.

Oppenheimer, P. (2011). Top-down network design. Indianapolis, Ind.: Cisco Press.