In the meantime, another friend has asked you to consult on their business netwo

Question

In the meantime, another friend has asked you to consult on their business networking needs. They are setting up a medium-sized technical literature e-publishing company, and they've rented a small campus of three single-story office buildings, each separated from the others by about a hundred feet or so of parking, driveway, trees, and shrubs, etc. Each building will house the people and systems for one group of products, but all must be able to collaborate in a variety of ways. They want a resilient, fault-tolerant network, and they think they want each building to have its own set of servers (for different applications, etc.). About 100 user workstations are planned for each building, which includes wireless access from laptops etc. Access controls on the network should allow for segregation of access to information by location -- only those information assets in building 2 that are declared "public organization-wide" for example should be accessible to workers in the other two buildings. What features does this drive you to consider for the overall network? What do you see as absolutely essential, and what would be good "future-proofing" for growth in capabilities and usage? What features should they look for in the network interfaces in the various computers, laptops, servers, etc., that they will be buying?

Explanation / Answer

What features does this drive you to consider for the overall network?

- High capacity : Since this network has spread over a wide area containing 3 buildings and each having almost 100 users.

- Network Management System: For such a complex network NMS is required which manages the network in a centralized manner.

- Wired/Wireless Services: Both wired and wireless services are required

- Secure Access: Network should implement firewall, VPN based Internet access mechanism to provide secure access to the users.

- Web content filtering: Legitimate traffic should be forwarded into the network.

- Scalability: Network design should be scalable so that when number of users increase, network should also be able to expand easily.

- Redundancy: Network design should have redundancy of vital components so that if one goes down another can serve

What do you see as absolutely essential, and what would be good "future-proofing" for growth in capabilities and usage?

Apart from scalability and redundancy, all the other features are essential. Scalability and redundancy is required for big organizations and thus if the company sie increases after a certain level then these two factors will play a vital role.

What features should they look for in the network interfaces in the various computers, laptops, servers, etc., that they will be buying?

- NIC should be capable of connecting to network by multiple (at least 2) means such as ethernet or wireless networks.

- Multiport NICs

- NIC with speed rating of atleast 11Mbps

- NIC drivers are up-to-date

- Optimized power usage

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