Assessment - Research Report

In your role as a Solutions Architect at M2M Solutions, you are leading a team of several system administrators. M2M solutions is a medium sized organisation and is currently expanding its operations.

The company has acquired six sites across Sydney to accommodate its various departments.You have been asked to design a network by utilizing 10.0.0.0 private IP address. The network should span six buildings with a router in each building to join the networks. It is assumed that each building will have its own single subnet .Company expects approximately 1200 workstation across all the sites with approximate numbers in each building as follows:

• Finance Office - 260 workstations
• Transport Office - 130 workstations
• Research Office - 120 workstations
• Sales Office - 40 workstations
• Information technology - 520 workstations
• Head Office - 60 workstations

TASK 1 - Write a 1000 words report explaining:

a. The detailed design of a simple addressing solution (with diagram(s) and step by step workout of the calculations) that leaves room for growth, is easy to administer and has the minimum wastage of available IP address space.

b. Explain what happens to your design if the number of hosts per network jumps to over 1,024 per building.

TASK 2 - Currently the company policy does not allow the use of network analysers on the organisational network. You have recently had a team meeting where all the staff are of the view that the use of network analysers can bring more efficiency in troubleshooting processes.

Write an 800 words report for the board of directors proposing to allow the use of network analysers for diagnostic purposes in new proposed network architecture. Your report should include:

a. Brief explanation of protocol in the context of communication networks and the role of network analysers. Explanation should include example of a situation where network analysers can be used in the context of Task 1.

b. An analysis of currently available network analyser tools. The analysis should contain:

i. Benefits, associated costs, ease of usability

ii. Recommendation from you, as to what tool would you prefer to use and why.

Rationale - This assessment aims to assess the following learning objectives of this subject:

• be able to analyse IP addressing requirements and design an addressing scheme;
• be able to analyse the requirements of IP routing and choose appropriate routing methods;
• be able to demonstrate how internetworking devices obtain their network configuration;
• be able to explain how data flows through the internet; and
• be able to ascertain and evaluate selection of applications and protocols for transferring data across the internet.