Network Design Case
Drop and Forge is a manufacturing firm having 200 employees with a 120-computer network
on its Toledo, Ohio, campus. The company has one very large manufacturing plant with an
adjacent five-story office building comprising 100 rooms. The office building houses 100
computers, with additional 20 computers in the plant. The current network is old and needs to
be replaced.
The new network will house a data center, the e-commerce edge and 12 printers. 10 printers
will be installed in the different rooms of the office building, while the other two are to be
installed in the plant. Employees will be allowed to bring their mobile devices (e.g., smart
phones, tablets) to work and use them to access required information such as their work email,
required documents and Internet.
Note, there are no other campuses, so you can omit WAN access.
Requirements
There are two parts of the requirements for this assignment – a) Report and b) Presentation.
Hand drawn layouts for both logical and physical designs are fine. However, if you like, you
Network Design Assignment
ITECH2301-Network Architecture and Design
CRICOS Provider No. 00103D itech2301_ass2- Network Design Assignment, Semester 1, 2018 Page 2 of 4
would use ConceptDraw (https://conceptdraw.en.softonic.com/) or SmartDraw
(www.smartdraw.com) or any other network design software to draw the layout of logical and
physical network designs.
a) Report [70 marks]
The report should be no more than 10 pages and needs to consider the following design
tasks:
Design Tasks:
T1. Using the building-block network design process, develop a logical design of the new
network for this enterprise campus that considers the seven network architecture
components. Remember to consider the expected growth of the company. For the
logical design, you need to consider the following items:
[25 marks]
1. Network architecture component
2. Application systems
3. Network users
4. Categorizing network needs
5. Deliverables
T2. Design the physical design of the network based on the logical design completed in
Task T1. Note, you do not need to develop any alternative design. For the physical
design, you need to consider the following items:
[25 marks]
1. Designing client and servers
2. Designing circuits
3. Network design tools
4. Deliverables
T3. You will make some assumptions; therefore, document your assumptions and explain
why you have designed the network in this way.
[10 marks]
T4. It is very important for you to explain to senior management that there will be
significant business benefits derived from continuing to grow the network.
Explain in detail what some of these will be.
