Advanced Network Design Individual written report and group demonstration Assignment
Assessment Title - Wide Area Network Design and Setup using VLANs for VOIP
Purpose of the assessment - Main objectives of this assignment is to enable student to understand networking devices, gather requirements for a given business case study, plan a network design and setup VLAN appropriately using physical networking devices. After successful completion of this assignment, students should be able to:
a. Analyse the need for advanced networks, standards and network solutions
b. Investigate suitable network designs to match requirements.
c. Create appropriate frameworks and standards for network implementation
d. Produce detailed business reports for planning, designing, implementing and comparing networks appropriate to business requirements.
Assignment Description - Design an advanced network for a case study given below.
Case Study:
A medium sized petrochemical company based in USA and it also has its operations in Australia and Middle East. Mr. Dough is Director IT and he is looks after the company's network infrastructure. The company's network infrastructure consists of application servers, routers and switches. Networking team can install and configure routers and switches.
Currently, company uses a separate network for its voice services. The director IT wants to migrate the voice services to Voice over IP to reduce voice circuit, operational and management cost. This because of the fact that presently all services only uses 50% of the WAN circuits or even lesser than that. However, WAN circuits are used upto 80% occasionally when their FTP service utilisation is increased sporadically.
The Director IT gives you following diagram as shown in Figure 1, that shows 40 sites. About 50 employees are working at each site and around 250 employees are at headquarters. The topology of the existing network is hybrid-star as shown in figure 1 having various WAN links ranging from 20Mbps broadband optical fiber to ISDN and T1 speed lines.
All remote sites uses an application server setup at headquarter to use FTP and a distributed GUI application. The FTP and distributed GUI application is used to transfer various types of file and graphics between remote sites and headquarters.
The Director IT wants Voice over IP solution and manage the related servers at headquarters. He also want to have redundancy at remote site to switchover if case of a failure. He also wants to test the Voice over IP service before it is implemented to all sites. The testing of the voice over IP service is to analyse if sporadic FTP service degrades it.
Write a report on a network plan by answering following:
1. What are the business requirements of the company?
2. What are the network's technical requirements?
3. How many IP phones should the network support, consider future extension in your design analysis?
4. What Quality of service features would you propose for WAN?
5. Would you propose an alternative redundant service in case of WAN failure? If yes what would be the service?
6. What would be your plan for testing the network?
7. How you will ensure that, voice service is not impacted by another data transfer service?
8. Draw a proposed network design.
9. Identify all networking device and map their functionalities and explain your design achieves the requirements of the network design.
10. Demonstrate a VOIP configuration using routers available in the labs.