ACE Network Design Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

ACE Network Design - Essay Example Secondly, the extensive use of e-commerce by corporations in their business operations has instigated a heightened requirement for connectivity of businesses with rest of the world through internet. Local area networks have to be hooked with internet while ensuring maximum security. Emphasizing the interaction of Local Area Networks with internet, Comer (2006, p.3) states, â€Å"From a user’s point view, the internet appears to consist of a set of application programs that use the underlying network to carry out useful communication tasks.† The increased dependence of organizational operations on computer networks has prompted detailed planning and management of network designs. Szczuka, Daniel and Dominik (p. 269) observes, â€Å"There has been an explosive growth in internet systems since the 1990s. Network design problems are one of the important issues in the building and expansion of computer networks and have attracted many related researchers’ attention.à ¢â‚¬  Advance Concepts Engineering (ACE) is a medium sized enterprise that deals with development and commercialization of products. Adoption and application of state-of-the-art technologies is a core business value at ACE. Although, presently ACE is operating is small setup but in the enterprise is in the phase of switching its business to a more specious building in an industrial park. This has generated a reasonably serious challenge of designing and implementing a network infrastructure that can meet the business requirement while keeping the core value of technological advancement intact. The network design and implementation is a challenging task in multistory building with a dozen of other design limitations. These limitations have given birth to a range from logical to physical issues in network implementation. These issues include the issues of network scalability, convergence, security, high availability, stability and network traffic management. ACE would require careful ly designed network architecture to achieve these corporate objectives. This report will present a detailed network infrastructure design to accommodate all business and technological needs of the network. The report will present also present a diagrammatic overview of the topological layout of network infrastructure devices. Moreover, to streamline the process of network design and management a number of requirements will be formulated and finalized. These requirements may include the number and type of components like user machines, switches, routers and servers, network availability details, addressing scheme, media to be used in the network and mechanisms to eradicate network and mechanical noise. Network Media The selection of network media is an important decision in network design and management. The decision of media can directly affect the network speed, sustainability and maintenance. The selection of media is topology dependent. Topology is the physical layout of network devices, (Ciccarelli & Faulkne, 2004, p.88) and the decision once made on topology and network media is seldom changed or it might be very expensive to change this decision at a later stage to cater network management or optimization issues. The selection of media for a network environment also depends on the user speed requirements, available resources and future network expansion plans. The ACE network will use a mix of unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) and fiber optic cables. Drop cables or patch cables that run from wall fixed faceplates to computers, printers, scanners, IP Phones and other user end devices will use CAT6 UTP cables, CAT6 UTP standard support the gigabit speed for network traffic. Faceplates will further connect these devices to switches placed in a separate switch rooms.