A. Current setting

A new bank has its headquarters located in City A. Recently, the bank has opened its first branch in City B, and its data centre in City C. The three cities are separated apart over a long distance between them, as illustrated in Figure A. The headquarters and data centre have been internally networked already. The data centre maintains important and confidential data of the clients and bank.

B. Requirements

The bank management is seeking networking solutions for meeting the requirements below: Local branch

• Ten bank officers are to be hired, each will have their own computer to work with.
• The LAN supports a data rate of 100Mbps.
• A database server needed for the staff to store and retrieve the financial data of clients.
• A printer offers a high-speed and good-quality printing service for all staff.
• Internet access for web and email services is necessary.
• To save long distance phone cost to the head and data offices, all the analogue phone conversations are combined with computer data and transmitted together on a link. Wide area sites
• A private network provides a high-speed delivery of voice and data among the three offices.
• The network operation is not affected by a link breakdown.

C. Task

You are a System Engineer of a computer and networking company, and your task is to design a network infrastructure to satisfy the above requirements of the bank. With the aid of a diagram, elaborate your design which should specify the computer facilities, cabling, network devices, data rate, network architectures, etc. There are no absolutely correct solutions, but you need to justify every implementation with good reasoning.

Figure A: Bank offices distributed in a large area