Design Of Network Topology With Star Topology And Use Of Fiber Optic Cable

Assumptions for the Solution to the Case Study

Assumptions undertaken for the solution to the case study:

1. The buildings are connected using the Cat5 cable with the nodes connected to the nearest switch.
2. Every switch in the building is then connected to uplink with the speeds over 1 Gbps using the fiber optics cable. The switches are connected to the main server.
3. Server is connected to the router from the ISP that will provide the company with the internet connectivity and the inbuilt gateway in the router will help to connect the two networks with each other.

The network should be designed as per the star topology where all the computers on the floor should be connected to the centralized switch using the UTP or Cat5 cable depending upon the budget of the organization. A wireless AP is advised to be there on each floor in order to cater the wireless devices and for future approach, number of nodes, number of connections needed and future aspects should be calculated before actual laid down of the network topology. With the small utility of wireless receiver at the nodes that are too far from the central node can connect using the wireless AP, the AP will act as the extension of the existing point, it will also help as in this case the wired architecture is more or less in place and if all the ports get exhausted we can install the wireless AP as discussed and extend the further use of the network, the 802.11ac based wireless router is recommended keeping in mind the industrial usage require higher bandwidths.

All the switches will be connected to the main server using the fiber optics cable that would run between the switches and then run back to the central building acting as the main server. It is highly recommended to use the multimode fiber optics cable in order to have larger bandwidth and fully optimize the power of the fiber link connections. The building with the data storage will be termed as the Main Building, here each of the buildings LAN would be taken as the connected device back to this main server available in the building. With the internet connectivity in place with the help of the router the main admin can decide who gets the permission to access which resources available on the network and which all doesn’t using the special software tools that are available in the market. The main datacenter will also host the main server on which all the central connections would be connecting and main controlled of the system would be there at this server itself. The server will also be hosting the eCommerce website of the company so developer can develop the website anywhere in the organization but would be easy to upload the files to the central main server hosting the website.

The purpose of the ping command is to check the IP level connectivity using the ICMP packets. Since ICMP echo is used to target the IP host and to check if the IP host is available for TCP/IP based connections. (Howtogeek.com, 2017)

Purpose of Commands Such as Ping, Gateway, and ARP

As the PING works on the IP packets in which there is no concept of ports etc. and uses the ICMP packet as main communications. As the communication takes place in one direction only so it is connectionless protocol. (Help, Help and Hope, 2017)

Since the ping uses the IP packet with ICMP protocol, and ICMP is the Layer 3 protocol so the PING is the layer 4 protocol. The header of the ICMP is similar to that of TCP and UDP this is why many argue over being the PING to be layer 4 protocol, but since there is no concept of the port and connections it is clear that it is not a layer 4 but layer 3 protocol. (Howtogeek.com, 2017)

The purpose of the gateway is to act as the central place where all the data from internal source goes to the outer world or internet and vice versa. Without this the internet connectivity or connectivity to the other networks would not be possible 

The main purpose of the ARP command to provide the mac address of the physical address of the devices being mapped to the IP packets coming from the outside of the network.  As we know the length of the IP address is 32 bits but the physical address is the 48 bits. In order to have the connectivity the RARP (Reverse address resolution protocol) map the specific system with the IP to the physical address and ARP map the physical address to the IP address of the packet. It is generally being used by the switches and base on the mac the information is forwarded received on the node. When an packet that is destined to be at the physical machine the gateway queries the ARP cache to check for the machine to which the packet is for, if the machine is found the packet is forwarded, if not then switch sends an update broadcast to receive the mac of the machines, if still the packet machine is not found the packet is dropped. (Help, Help and Hope, 2017)

-a: displays the IPv4 and IPv6 routing tables of the current connections. All the entries to the respective devices and their IP address along with the interface IP is displayed.

-inet_addr: to specially specify the IP address.

-N if_addr: filter out and display only those entries that are specified by if_addrc

Netstat 

Purpose of Netstat

Migration from NAS to SAN

The purpose of this command is to display all the connections to which the computer is currently connected to, connections having the protocol in use with the Desktop address or the machine address and current state of the connection (Listening, Connected, half-open).  (Help, Help and Hope, 2017)

-a = display all the active connection of the machine that are working on TCP and UDP based protocol.

-b = display the filename or the application rather than the PID.

-e = statistics of all the connections in the network are being displayed using this command option, it also includes the unicast and non-unicast packets and their respective errors. (Whirlpool.net.au, 2017)

The TCP works on three-way handshake for successful connection and to terminate the information is need to be confirmed at both the ends in order to maintain the connectivity. The connection disconnection is only done when the end receives that the machine has agreed to disconnect message. But due any reason if the message is not received the connection is open in the listening mode and doesn’t break as the connection break message is not received at the end.  Since the protocol cannot transmits anything the port remain open this is the situation which is known as half open connections. The situation in which one side thinks the connection is broken and other still waits. (Whirlpool.net.au, 2017) 

There are lot of ways in which the data can be migrated to SAN but there are number of pros and cons that should be discussed and everyone should be made aware of. The earlier implementation in the organization is NAS (network assisted storage). As there are number of advancement in the technology there are number of ways that are better and optimized as per the new age requirements. The storage has now move on to the Data Centers where all the data of many is being organized and stored securely. But the migration is dependent on some of the major factors that are listed below:

• Location of the organization
• Business needs
• Customer needs
• Technical requirements
• Source and Destination storage requirements
• Applications in use
• Data dependencies.

There are two ways in which migration from the NAS to SAN can be done:

1. Manual mode where all the connections and naming to be done manually which is quite a tedious process for any organization to go through.
2. The Automated process with global namespace by viewing and accessing files which are independent on any location the organization is from and provide all the administrative features that allow administrators to modify, delete, add and update the data and files as if the files reseeded in the same machine itself. They will also define the special access and access restrictions to many users depending upon the data and organization requirements. (Yasuda et al., n.d.)

There are number of reasons based on which we can assured to have more benefits to migrate from NAS to SAN, the reasons are listed below: 

1. The Transaction intensive applications and databases use high performance data which is in Object Oriented manner, the performance on SAN based architecture is higher as compare to the NAS based architecture as the NAS has higher latency and there are more chances of losses in the communications over the SAN network.
2. NAS based applications share the network resources and the left-over bandwidth is made available to applications hence it will always have lesser bandwidth as compare to SAN because the SAN doesn’t require high bandwidth and most of the bandwidth is available for applications and data communication.
3. As the NAS is connected using the ethernet which lossy there would be number of packets that would be dropped and congestion would take place inevitably. With the SAN with higher bandwidth connections as compared to the NAS so lesser network troubles as in the NAS and better optimized performance of the network.
4. With data protection and frequent snapshots of the data being backed up the storage is NAS is depleted or always occupied, in SAN based solution the backup is stored at the different location at the service provider hence the entire solution of SAN makes more sense.

The migration to the SAN will require a well laid down plan that with all the required preparations and overall managed and monitored with careful execution plan in order to avoid any misshaping and keeping the roll back option in place and use it as and if required. The key to upgrade is the drivers and firmware of the devices being updated to the SAN compatible versions in order to have optimal performance and minimalistic errors. (Yingwu Zhu and Yiming Hu, n.d.)

References

The models, hardware, network device, servers in place etc all of them should be updated as per the SAN requirements and connectivity should be made using the fiber optic or Gigabit LAN wires. All this need to be documented and kept for record for working on the system. (Zhu, 2010)

With respect to the migration route is being adopted the host you may need to consider other aspects of the components such as storage virtualization engines with respect to the current and future demands. As shifting from one SAN to another would be quite cumbersome as different strategies being used by different vendors. (Zhu, 2010)

Example Amazon

1. Pay as you go model
2. Economical and you pay for what you have used and for how long
3. No contracts
4. Hardware is decided by the service provider no customization possible
5. System performance is pre-defined.

1. Provides higher security being private
2. Dedicated to single organization
3. Customizable and hardware can be updated as requested.
4. Supports hybrid implementations. (DeCusatis, n.d.)

1. This is the mixture of the two public and private cloud hosting
2. Provides economical and provides required security to the organization data. (DeCusatis, n.d.).

The accessibility and security enhancement of the cloud with optimal solutions and making it overall future proof helps in developing solutions that are needed by any organization today and helps any organization to scale up with the matter of few clicks itself

References

Baden, W., Bodoh, D., Williams, A. and Kuzminski, P. (2011). SystemwideModeler: A fast-time simulation of the NAS. 2011 Integrated Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance Conference Proceedings.

Burns, R., Rees, R. and Long, D. (n.d.). Safe caching in a distributed file system for network attached storage. Proceedings 14th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. IPDPS 2000.

DeCusatis, C. (n.d.). Storage area network applications. Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibit.

Help, H., Help, N. and Hope, C. (2017). Help with ping, winipcfg, and other network commands.. [online] Computerhope.com. Available at: https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000444.htm [Accessed 1 May 2017].

Howtogeek.com. (2017). 10 Useful Windows Commands You Should Know. [online] Available at: https://www.howtogeek.com/168896/10-useful-windows-commands-you-should-know/ [Accessed 1 May 2017].

Sarkar, P., Voruganti, K., Meth, K., Biran, O. and Satran, J. (2003). Internet Protocol storage area networks. IBM Systems Journal, 42(2), pp.218-231.

Sohan, R. and Hand, S. (2005). A user-level approach to network attached storage. The IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks 30th Anniversary (LCN’05)l.

Telikepalli, R., Drwiega, T. and Yan, J. (2004). Storage area network extension solutions and their performance assessment. IEEE Communications Magazine, 42(4), pp.56-63.

Whirlpool.net.au. (2017). Windows Network Diagnostic Commands. [online] Available at: https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/windows_nw_diag_cmds [Accessed 1 May 2017].

Yasuda, Y., Kawarnoto, S., Ebata, A., Okitsu, J. and Higuchi, T. (n.d.). Concept and evaluation of X-NAS: a highly scalable NAS system. 20th IEEE/11th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, 2003. (MSST 2003). Proceedings..

Yingwu Zhu and Yiming Hu (n.d.). SNARE: a strong security scheme for network-attached storage. 22nd International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, 2003. Proceedings..

Zhu, Y. (2010). Design and realization of data center based on SAN. 2010 2nd IEEE International Conference on Information Management and Engineering.