Assignment task: SmartBuildings Limited Company has hired you as a network design consultant. This company is one of the suppliers of energy efficient sensor-based solutions for smart buildings in South Asia. A recognized competitor recently opened for businesses that may lead putting SmartBuildings out of business. In response to this, the owners of SamrtBuildings have decided to invest substantial sumof money in the company to expand and face the competition.
SmartBuildings locally owns a 4 storey building and currently has grown to a level where they have 300 staff and this figure is still growing. The staff will be in 4 different departments (Sales, Marketing, Engineering and Operations). They have decided to expand their businesses to other strategic location in South Asia. This new branch with approximately 100 staff will incorporate engineering and sales departments and it will have two single storey buildings located 200m apart.
The goal is to determine the types of network components and technologies, transmission mediA, structured cabling, network software and services they will need. Also consider the types and number of computers, servers, printers, multimedia devices and multifunction state of the art peripherals that are needed. Two sites should be interconnected securely over the public Internet. Before they invest money in the proposed network, the owner wants to know more about the advantages, cost and maintainability of the LANs and the Internet connections (WAN). Use the Internet, articles, whitepapers, books or any other related materials as reference to answer the owners' requirements.
You are expected to identify essential equipment as well as IP- based voice and video requirements for a converged network. A suitable IP address allocation scheme should be provided.
1. What LAN (VLAN, DHCP, ..), WAN technologies (ADSL, WiMAX, ..) and speeds should the company use?
2. What kinds of security mechanisms can be applied to secure your LANs (DMZ, Firewalls, ..) and to interconnect three sites (VPN/IPSec, ..)?
3. What are the network services (E-mail, Web, Database, Storage, Backup, Cloud, ..) and software the company can use? How to obtain public IP addresses and domain name registrations (NAT, DNS)?
4. What types of problems should be expected maintaining the network (UPS, Lightning protections, Reliability with redundancy)?