Assignment

Part A: Mini Case Study (2 pages maximum)

Modified Drop and Forge.

Drop and Forge is a small manufacturing firm with 60 computers on their network. The company has one very large manufacturing plant with an adjacent office building. The office building houses 50 computers, with an additional 10 computers in the plant. The current network is an old 5 Mbps Ethernet that will need to be completely replaced.

The company is also looking at expanding their operations by providing specialized design modelling to their customers. This would involve the creation of computer generated animation of the design for the customer before creating the final product which should prove more cost effective then creating prototypes. It is hoped that by providing the customer with a virtual model that more international orders may be attracted. The design office would require considerable computing power for design process and storage for the models.

Draw and describe the network you would recommend and how it would be configured. Be sure to include the devices and type of network circuits you would use and the reason for the selection. You will need to make some assumptions regarding the organisation and their needs.

Be sure to document your assumptions and explain why you have designed the network in this way and how the design will solve the company needs.

The essays do not require in text references or a list of references.

Part B Hands on

You are to go through the Hands on exercise (5A on page 187 of the textbook edition 11) (5A on page 151 of the textbook edition 12). You will need access to a networked computer with access to the PING, ARP and TRACEROUTE tool. For some of the activity if you have a restrictive firewall you will need to search for a looking glass type services and modify your report accordingly (search Google for looking glass tools). The exercise has a number of activities for you to perform, but for the assignment we only need the output and discussion for the following activities. If you are using non Windows machines the commands may be slightly different. You will have to research to what is an appropriate command for your environment.

IPCONFIG: Finding your computer settings (ifconfig on *nix system may require sudo access)

ARP: Displaying Physical Address

TRACERT: Finding Routes through the Internet

Each of the activities listed include a number of deliverables that you will need to attach as part of your assignment submission. Make sure you provide a description of the activity and the meaning of the result or how the result could be interpreted for full marks. For the output of the commands use the screen capture capabilities. Under Windows use Cmd Alt Print Screen keys combinations to capture the current active window and then paste into word document. For Mac OS use Command-Shift-4, then space, and then click a window you want to capture.

Part C: Business Report (10 pages for body of the report)

After a number of business seminars dealing with the future adoption of technologies within the business framework a theme of Mobile computing, the need for the business sector to enable employees a flexible access to the company services was highlighted. This meant giving employees freedom to move out of their cubical and still have access to their information and services.

The most obvious solution that was suggested was to introduce tablet to the employees to supplement their access to their work. This way they could use their desktops as the standard working platform, but for the impromptu and dynamic meetings to trouble shoot problems and discuss new developments, the tablet could be used. Since the organisation uses the desktop PC as client only device with all the processing performed using the back end servers adding extra connections would only be a temporary solution. A redesign which looks to better capitalise on the change in technology might be a more scalable solution.

The new mobile devices direction from management means that the network design needs a major rethink and redesign especially if portion or all of the services will be moved to the cloud. The organisation also plans to split into two separate offices to bring their operations closer to their main partners and customers in the future. It is believed that their proximity to major partners will help them to better service the partner needs and grow the organisation.

As a result of the new direction you have been tasked to provide a report to address the following areas of concern and also provide more information to facilitate a better decision making process.

Note: When we say Mobile devices we mean devices that can be used by employees to access the data and services in an unstructured network environment as well as through other third party networks.

You are to provide a report to address 5 areas of concern and educational needs raised during the meeting.

• The cloud solutions are not well formulated at the moment due to some misunderstanding of what the term actually means. Research and provide a paragraph describing cloud services benefits to adopting cloud as a solution.

• Describe the types of cloud services that are available along with benefits and disadvantages fof each solution as it impacts the organisation described.

• The organisation runs a traditional 3-Tier network solution for its IT needs. With each possible cloud solution identify what changes would need to made to the organisation and employees in order to make the project a success.

• Consider the overall impact that the introduction of new devices would have on the network functionality and availability. Identify possible problems and issues that the introduction of mobile computing could have on the network services. Identify training and education that might need to be carried out before the introduction of the new devices and technologies.

• As the organisation is determined to move to cloud services identify the solution that you believe would best meet the organisational needs for now and in the future. Provide justification for your recommendations.