IT Infrastructure Solutions For Big Three Company

Objective of network design

Multi Tech Inc. is a network engineering and company offering solution for large size and mid-size company design and implementation of Local area network and Wide area network. The aim of our solution is to increase productivity for organizations, improve business workflows and staff performance.

This proposal is for Big Three Company’s new building. The project is being funded by the company at a cost of $ 100000. All the feasibility requirements have been assessed to meet the proposal design and its implementations.

Big Three Limited Company is a mid-size food supply company that have more than five outlets in the country. The company are moving to a new building with open offices in two weeks times. The business operation will not be sufficient without network design and implementation since the business continues to expand. Therefore Multi Tech Inc. will provide a design a network design and infrastructure that is scalable in future.

In Big Three Limited Company the work that shall be done include network design, installation of a star network topology. Installation will include network devices, cables, workstations, servers, hub, routers switches and trunking of all the cables.

The network that has been proposed is designed to cover the entire new Big Three Limited Company building. The building is well structured therefore during the laying of the network it will provide much flexibility in term of network coverage. The building consist of the following structures: Two open offices, ICT Office, ten managers’ office, one boardroom, one customer show room, file archive, one server room and one catering room.

The network is designed to achieve various goals for Big Three Company include low down time and high availability.

• Security The networkimplementation will have firewalls, Intrusion detection system, intrusion Prevention system and virtual private network for the clients that will be accessing the network from external network. Cooperate antivirus will be deployed to all the workstations in the network.
• Updated devices. The devices being deployed in the network will be the current release and updated by the vendors. It include firewalls, routers, switches etc.
• The network is design to be available at all time. In case one network fails the other one will take over hence the business can continue with their operations without any disruptions.
• Processing of information. Big Three Company will be able to share information in the network, cloud backups and run day to day activities remotely.
• The designed network infrastructure supports flexible scalability. Network cables will support wide range of cables for example fiber cable and coaxial cable. The cable trunk also can be added more cables if need be required.

 The network has been designed to support over five hundred employees in the new building. Currently the Big Three Company has one hundred employees.

Server Room

The server room shall be unauthorized/restricted room. Those who are authorized such as network administrator will be able to access. The room will be a well-ventilated, room temperature will be a range of 17 degrees to 20 degrees. The room will be housing power supply, firewall, IDS, IPS, servers, switches, routes, internet service providers’ cabinet (Internet access point entries), and telephone systems.

1. Servers

• Servers include: File Server that will enable file sharing
• Print Server: The print servers will be managing all the printers being shared in the network.
• Active Directory server: This server will be responsible for managing all the users and computers in the network.

1. Cables

• Cat 6 will be mainly use in network transmission to workstations.
• Fiber cables. Fiber cables are used in devices interconnection such as internet access entry and connecting to hubs or switches.
• Cables trunking and tagging also will be done to provide an easy way during troubleshooting in future.

1. Power Supply

• Main power supply will be the electricity being used in the building.
• Backup power supply will be used of solar panels that will provide uninterruptible in case of main power loss.

1. Telephone For communication and testing purposes.

Open Office Rooms

We have two open office rooms, so each one will consist of fifty workstations for staffs. Each workstation will be all in one to reduce with one keyboard and one mouse. The requirements for this offices will be

• 100 workstations
• Cat 6 cables for each
• Two network printers that will be accessible at each office
• 100 Telephone

Network Design Details

Manager’s Office

The manager’s office room will ten of them. Each manager’s office will have the following.

• Two workstations/Laptops
• Cat 6 Cable
• 2 Telephone
• 1 network printer

Board Room

The board room shall have the following:

• 10 Cat 6 Cables
• 1 Telephone
• 1 network printer
• 1 Wireless access point

Customer Show Room

The customer show room will have the following:

• 4 Cat 6 cables
• 1 Telephone
• 1 network Printer

File Archive Room

• 1 Cat 6 cable
• 1 Telephone
• 1 Network Printer

Catering Hall

The catering will have the following:

• 3 Cat 6 Cables
• 1 Telephone
• 2 Network printer

ICT office

The ICT office shall have the following:

• 1 Wireless access point
• Cat 6 Cabling
• 3 Telephone
• Network Printers
• Laptop computers

The following are the assumption made during designing of the network:

• All the network devices will be new and first time to be installed on site.
• Internet service providers will be two in case of fail over one will take over the service delivery.

Network analysis helps to define the need of the customer in any network implementation. There are factors that need to be considered in order to be determine the kind of services that the Big Three Limited Company wants include:

• BigThree Company deals with food supplies, so most of the data being processed are for accounting which includes invoices, orders from the client through online websites.
• Source of data. Source of data will affect the network connectivity. If the source of data traffic will be high then the network performance will degrade. Analyzing this source of data will help us understand the need of the customer. Data source will be from the workstations application which will be processing data.
• Network Speed. The speedfor the Big Three should be fast enough to handle large traffic of more than hundreds workstation.
• Load variations in the network. The network’s traffics will be high from 8:00am to 3:00pm because most of the staff will be busy preparing customer’s requests. At night the network’s traffic will be low since no one will be using.
• Over the network the firewall will be implemented so that only users within the network can access the services. Only external users will be allowed to connect to internal through virtual private network services. The access points for staff and administration will be different. Any wireless hotspot which is meant for customers at show room will be secrete from the other network. All the workstation shall have antivirus installed. This will ensure that the workstation are safe from any threats.

All the staff in the network will be group under departmental. This will ease the policies which will be enforce for each department. Users from the external network will have to authenticate themselves through active directory in case they want to access the internal services such as file sharing.

All the servers will be running on one physical host and share all the resources. This is an efficient way of sharing resources and reducing cost of buying bare metal servers.

All the backup in the Big Three Company will be stored in the cloud. Back will include user’s files, emails, ERP database and network configurations. Back up shall be schedule to be done overnight. System administration shall be receiving automated mails from the cloud whenever backup fail or finished successfully.

Cloud Mailing Service

Cloud email exchange will be lease. This will reduce the budget of buying more operating system license and hardware.  Cloud backup for mail service will be created so that if in case of data lose, data can be restore it quickly.

Requirements of Access

All the users will be able to access for the ERP resources in the Big Three Company. The server which will be handling the workload has enough resources. The users not experience time out for any services. Also balance load will be added to ensure that the request from users are distributed to the laoders.

The type of staff that will be expected include:

• Staff accessing ERP
• Human resources
• File sharing services
• Administrative access

Servers

Server should have the following minimum requirements

• 2 Cores
• 64 bit Processor
• 128GB Memory
• 2 TB Storage
• Microsoft Windows Server 2016
• Ubuntu Server

File Server

• Microsoft File Sharing will be hosted locally.
• Minimum of 500GB Storage

Web Server

• Apache Server for website host
• Tomcat to host the only ERP

Database Server

• Oracle database will be used.
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Minimum of 1TB Storage capacity required

Routers

• Cisco 2800 Series

Switches

• Cisco Catalyst 3650

 

Disaster Recovery Plan

In any business recovery plan must be set since anytime a hardware of storage device may failed. In Big Three Company the recovery plan will be set by using windows services to schedule the following types of backups:

• Full BackupsThis involves making a copy of all the data to a local media then synchronized with cloud backup. This will be done every week.
• Incremental Backups. This is the daily backup that will be done. Incremental is backup to the local storage before synchronized to the cloud backup. This type of backup is done daily at night by a schedule service
• Differential Backups. This involves full backup and new changes. The data will be copied to a local storage before synchronized with the cloud back. The backups will be schedule to be done every weekends when the server is idle.

Also With windows and Linux servers, a restore point will be created so that in case of any failure the operating system can be restored to the previous state.

Conclusion

In conclusion, all the requirements specified for this proposal and need to be met during implementation stage.

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