Reference no: EM133302102

Case Study Scenario

Company

The Cantor Building has been sold by Sheffield Hallam University to a large Petrochemical company "Big Oil". This is because the classrooms and offices will no longer be necessary as all teaching and learning has been moved to the Cloud. All existing IT equipment has been sold to a third party and removed. Due to a misunderstanding, the contractors also removed all the internal cabling and patch panels, so there is no existing network infrastructure in the building.

The company wishes to locate approximately 1500 office and support staff in the building. All current staff offices will be kept as offices where possible, but existing classrooms will be converted to open plan offices each accommodating 5-15 staff based on the size of the room.

IT Services and Networking

There are no existing IT Facilities in the building. Each employee will have a desktop PC and VoIP phone which must be connected to the LAN. You need to accommodate the use of wireless devices through the building.

• Your network design should allow for VoIP traffic, but end user devices (Desktop PCs or VoIP phones) need not be specified or chosen.
• Departments within "Big Oil" will need to be separated using VLANS but will all need access to networking services and the Internet.
• "BigOil" is committed to achieving a 50minutes maximum down time per year (99.99%).

Server Room Requirements
A server room should be allocated which will contain 4 physical racks for servers. Servers, 2 or 4 rack unit each, running around 100 virtual machines providing a wide range of network and application services to the building. A fully fault tolerant network infrastructure for the server room should be designed and specified.
• Power requirement for the server room should be calculated so that the building power infrastructure can be adjusted where necessary.
• The exact server specification need not be specified or chosen for this assessment.
Internet Access Requirements
Staff are considered to be moderate internet users. A single or dual homed ISP solution will be acceptable as long as it is justified.

Assessment Summary
In this assessment you are given the task of designing a network for a company. You should produce a network design proposal of around 2500 words plus diagrams and tables explaining the design you have produced and justifying the decisions you have made.
• The proposal should include suitable referencing following university appropriate guidelines.
• The tables, diagrams or any appendices are excluded from the word count.
• The current company IT policy limits you to using a traditional network architecture for your initial proposal but you need to develop a further business case for to incorporate Software- Defined Networking (SDN) solutions (refer to part 5)

1. Customer Design Requirements
Consider the 5 steps given in Figure 1-6 "Steps in identifying customer requirements" in CCDA 200- 310 Official Certification Guide.
1. Identify which issues have already been considered in the scenario which you have been given, and which issues may need further investigation.
2. Identify the main issues that would need to be clarified, or the assumptions that you need to make. Propose and justify an approach to your network design process.

2. Physical Network Design
Based on the design requirements and decisions that you have made in part1, you should make recommendations with justification on the following aspects of the physical network design.
Considerations for expansion should also be included in your design.

1. Location of server room
2. Location of wiring closets on each floor
3. Location and number of access points on each floor*
4. Rack numbers, location and specification * (Servers' specification need not be specified or chosen)
5. Location and number of patch panels and wall sockets/faceplates *
6. Type of cabling *

Note: Produce a table of items and costs for each of the sections where items are flagged with a star (*).
For cabling it should include a ballpark figure for the number of ports. Rack panels and patch cord specifications and costs should be given.

3. Enterprise Campus and Internet Access Design
You should make recommendations of the following aspects of the Layer 2 - layer 7 Network Infrastructure design:
1. Number and location of switches / routers / firewalls / APs / WLCs

2. Exact model and port density and form factor for each device (part numbers and specifications) *
3. Power consumption per rack should be calculated so that the building power infrastructure can be adjusted where necessary
4. Justify your device choice with respect to particular Technology support such as SFP+, Stackwise support, VSS, Routing, GLBP, Power consumption, PoE, VoIP/Multimedia, Wireless Standards, etc.
5. Internet connectivity design*
6. Physical network design topology
7. Logical network design topology including IP addressing plan

4. Secure network management and monitoring plan
Your proposal should include the following items:

1. Secure device management and authentication plan. Providing a brief secure management plan which will give an overview of basic configurations required before components can be installed.
2. Network management and monitoring solutions including SNMP, logging solutions and IP address management*
Note: Produce a table of items and costs for each of the sections where items are flagged with a star (*).

5. Future migration plan to a software-defined solution
The current company IT policy limits you to using a traditional network architecture, for this section you need to develop a brief business case for your proposed network design to incorporate Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solutions.
Your Software-Defined solution should include the following items:

1. The advantages and possible disadvantages this might bring to your network
2. An implementation and deployment plan for introducing SDN, identifying the devices that support your SDN solution and devices that need to be upgraded * You do not need to provide a full inventory at this stage.