Friendly Limited

Read me 1s: This is an individual piece of coursework. Please refrain from copying material from your classmates as the penalties for plagiarism could be severe. Whilst producing this piece of work you are expected to perform some research - all sources must be acknowledged and cited using an appropriate referencing notation. Note that the scenario provided does not provide a complete definition of the problem. You are required to fill in the gaps whenever you feel necessary by making assumptions - please keep those reasonable. Try not to exceed the given word count by more than 10%, excluding references, appendices and diagrams.

Scenario

Friendly Limited, a small company employing about 400 human employees, has recently purchased a new site for their main base of operations. Prior to moving to the new site, the appropriate infrastructure needs to be put in place. You have been contracted by the company's CEO, Dr Evil Saruman, to design an affordable and fit for purpose network for them. Ideally such a solution will offer a good level of performance (something they struggled with in their old network), reliability/fault tolerance and security. In order to assist you in the process of producing a solution that fulfils their requirements, the company has given you access to the new site, as well as their current, soon to be abandoned, premises.

The new site is located on the banks of river Thames, close to Oxford, and consists of two buildings. The first of the two buildings, The White Tower, has four floors. The first (ground) floor is intended to house a visitor's centre, offering a cafeteria, a conference room and a showroom. Wireless access should be available to the visitors. The other floors contain a number of offices and are intended to house the management, human resources and sales departments. Office space here is far more than what is required by those three departments.

The second building, The Gray Castle, is a three-storey building located in the other side of the river, opposite to The White Tower. A bridge located nearby allows employees to walk from one building to the other. Since the company is very security conscious, access to The Gray Castle is for authorised company personnel only. It was suggested that the IT facilities office and server rooms could be located on the first (ground) floor. The rest of the space in the building is to be used for office space by the company's remaining 6 departments (finance, research and development, engineering, design, legal and marketing). This arrangement might need to change (Dr Saruman waits for your suggestions), as currently there is not enough office space for all those departments within this building.

The company currently appears to be expanding, with an increase in personnel during the last few years. You have been asked to take this fact into account when designing your solution.

Tasks

Ultimately you need to produce a report that discusses your design, the problems identified, your solutions, and the justification of your decisions and solutions. We are interested on how you apply theory for solving specific issues relating to the scenario and your assumptions; reciting everything you know about a topic without applying it or linking it to the problem will earn you zero marks. The key areas that you need to address in your report are:

Introduction (keep it brief, including structure, presentation, writing style, etc).

Explain the requirements gathering process and the assumptions made about the company, the buildings, and other parameters of the problem.

Present your network design. Provide a topology diagram and justify your design decisions. In addition, discuss physical topology and related issues such as device characteristics, wiring and device placement.

Discuss security aspects and measures. Those can include policy recommendations (but please do not try to write a policy document), device configuration and related technologies that could be used.

Design an appropriate addressing scheme and discuss/explain/justify this design.

References using the university formatting recommendations.