ICT703 Assessment Task 2 P a g e 1 ICT703 Network Technology and Management Assessment Task 2 Assessment and Submission Details Marks 35% of the total assessment for the course Due Date – Friday 5...

networking assignment


ICT703 Assessment Task 2 P a g e 1 ICT703 Network Technology and Management Assessment Task 2 Assessment and Submission Details Marks 35% of the total assessment for the course Due Date – Friday 5 October at 5PM Submission details Please submit this assignment as a single MS Word document (.docx) via the assessment module of the course web site on Blackboard. All assignments will be checked for plagiarism and/or collusion between individuals. Please note that each student needs to make a second copy of the assignment and this copy must be produced within 24 hours of it being requested by the Course Coordinator. Assignment submission extensions will only be made using the official Faculty of Arts, Business and Law Guidelines. Requests for an extension to an assignment extension must be made prior to the date of submission. Notice: Parts of this assignment brief are adopted from the Cisco Networking Essentials course that is copyright material. © 2017 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) is a Cisco Networking Academy. ICT703 Assessment Task 2 P a g e 2 Background: You have obtained a contract position at a small marketing and advertising firm called the Colour Ability Corporation (CAC). Your contract responsibilities are to help them plan their emerging networking and communications requirements and update their IT resources. CAC currently hires 80 employees and operates from Level 10 and 11 on the X Tower in Brisbane CBD. CAC has recently purchased a four-story building in a Brisbane suburb where they can allocate a separate floor to each of their four departments, i.e., (1) marketing, (2) advertising, (3) design and photography, and (4) HR and accounting. They plan to move to their new office in three months. Also, CAC’s list of customers has greatly expanded to other cities, mainly Sydney where their customers in Sydney are demanding more interactive advertising media, including video presentations. The management recognizes the business potential in this new market in Sydney and have leased a small office in Sydney (aka CAC’s fifth department) to host 8 local employees. They have hired you to review their existing IT resources and produce a proposal that allows the company to take advantage of their firm’s expansion. The management has stated that if the proposal meets their requirements, they may hire you full-time to implement and manage these new resources. You now have an idea of the scope of the project that you have undertaken, but do not have all of the information required to proceed. Using the details provided in the following sections you are required to prepare a professional business report of 2500 words addressing the eight activities identified below. Part 1: Gather System Requirements. CAC has provided a written summary containing floor plans for their Brisbane and Sydney offices, and notes from a verbal interview with the management team. Gather as much information as possible from these two sources to help you plan a technical solution for CAC’s networking and communications requirements. Step 1: Review available information. CAC Information: Because CAC is a small size business, it has no IT department. Everyone has taken care of their own resources in the Brisbane office. If they could not fix the problem, they would call in an outside service technician. Currently, the machines are connected together through fourteen (14) 10/100Mb switches (with 10 ports each). Employees work with older PC tower computers with 2 Gb of memory, a 250 Gb hard drive, and 7 USB ports. The processors are AMD Athlon 64 x2 dual core processor and a CD/DVD read/write drives. Additionally, graphics production editors (team of 10 employees in Brisbane) utilize PCs with 8 GB of memory and 500 Gb hard drive to run special editing software that uses very high-resolution graphics. The systems are all still running the Windows 7 operating system, and there is a low-capacity, monochrome laser printer attached to each machine. These machines are not capable of running the software required for video development. The Sydney office will be operational soon, and additional employees will be hired to handle the new video production work. The company will have the following employees at the Sydney office: ICT703 Assessment Task 2 P a g e 3 Sydney Department Manager – Duties include scheduling work, hiring and managing part-time workers, weekly payroll, and project tracking. The administrative manager uses spreadsheet and database software and must be able to use email. Film Production Editor – Requires special editing software that uses very high-resolution graphics and requires at least 16 GB of memory to run effectively. The software also interfaces with a video capture interface board that uses PCIex16 slot in the computer. This specialized software only works in a Windows 10 environment. It is important that the computer purchased for this position supports high-resolution video and has enough memory to enable the editor to work quickly. The production editor produces the final copies of the films and works within very tight deadlines. The editor must also be able to use email. Film Crew – The other six employees are mobile workers, consisting of two production assistants, two camera people, a production manager, and a film director. They are in the Sydney office an average of two days per week. The rest of the time is spent either at customer sites or on film locations. Because all of the mobile workers are required to have access to email and production schedules, both at the office and while on location, it is important for them to be able to connect to the main office from anywhere. They have no special software requirements, but they do need a large hard drive to store the film files while they are working on them. The mobile workers must work at various locations and may not always be able to plug into a data port. It is important that they are able to connect to the internal network wirelessly. Because of the sensitive nature of some of the documents and records required by the managers of all five departments, private color laser printers must be installed in the managers’ offices in both Brisbane and Sydney. Combination copiers/printers and high-resolution scanners must also be purchased and shared among all employees. For the purposes of training and compatibility, all of the computers should use the same operating system and applications, if possible. ICT703 Assessment Task 2 P a g e 4 Brisbane Office Floor Plan (four identical floors) Figure 1: Brisbane Office Floor Plan Sydney Office Floor Plan Figure 2: Sydney Office Floor Plan Step 2: Interview with the Management. Below are the notes collected during an interview session with the management team. • CAC employees need access to email, which they currently get from their ISP. The email system that the ISP provide uses a web client that CAC employees can access over the Internet. CAC employees are also able to access this email from their home computers. • CAC want to be able to set up email accounts for employees to use while they are working with them. ICT703 Assessment Task 2 P a g e 5 • It is necessary for managers and employees to share files between themselves. These files are usually spreadsheets and documents, but sometimes, they must send large film files back and forth between the mobile workers and the office. Files must be available for download during the day, and also at night, when employees are away from the office. These film files are usually between 5 GB and 20 GB in size. • The management wants some project files to be kept securely in a central location and can be accessed and shared only by the department managers. • Color printers that are also capable of making copies are required for each workspace – one on each floor of the new Brisbane office and one in the Sydney office. Because the printers are expensive, it is necessary for everyone to be able to print to it when they are in the office. Some of the storyboard documents are over 100 pages, with lots of graphics. • Wireless internet access should be made available in all five departments. • In response to the CAC’s enquiries regarding their IPv4 needs, their ISP has provided them with the following diagram (Figure 3) and has advised that CAC can continue using their current block of public IPv4 addresses, that is 194.32.9.0/28, as well as blocks of private IPv4 addresses, i.e., 192.168.0.0/24, for their private networks. Each department is assigned to an individual subnet, where all the departments and the Sydney office should be able to communicate with each other, and any necessary internal server(s), and access the Internet. Figure 3: Proposed Topology Step 3: Select the appropriate services and equipment. After you have gathered all the appropriate information, it is time to do some research. You must now use your knowledge and research skills to propose an appropriate technical solution for their limited budget and time requirements. Proposing a solution that is beyond the financial capabilities of the company is of no benefit. However, it can be helpful to propose a solution within the current budget, and offer suggestions that would improve network performance or productivity if ICT703 Assessment Task 2 P a g e 6 additional funding becomes available. If you can justify these extra expenditures, the company may consider them for later implementation or may even find the extra funding needed. When developing a plan, it is often easier to start at the end user and then work back toward the network and any shared resources, and then finally, any external connections to the Internet or other networks. Many different forms have been developed to help with planning and equipment selection. It is a good idea to use one of these forms or to design your own to keep everything organized. Activity 1 Use the following form to develop a proposed computer system for each of the specific uses, i.e., general use, graphics production and film production. Search the Internet or local sources for availability and pricing information. Use the same form