You work as a network consultant for West Consulting, a graphic design and printing company.

 

West Consulting is growing in customer and sales volume and therefore, is expanding its local campus in Houston, Texas and adding a test location in China.

 

You are tasked with designing a network to support their growth and expansion plan and drafting a proposal. You will work on this project over the next five weeks. The first task is to confirm your understanding of the project and outline your high-level plan to approach the design.

 

Refer to the West Consulting Network Design Summary document; which lists the network requirements and configuration details.

 

Create a Customer Design Summary that includes the following:

 

Project Summary – A description of the organization, the business environment, and the project purpose

 

Design Requirements – Desired functional network requirements, any technical constraints, and network performance or design goals

 

Existing High-Level Network Infrastructure Survey – Include logical topology diagrams (layer 3) and physical network diagrams of current infrastructure and routing

 

Implementation Plan – Description of a high-level network upgrade plan based on Cisco’s network design lifecycle principles and an explanation of how your plan addresses West Consulting’s goals and strategies

 

Diagram your current network survey in Microsoft® Visio®.

 

Document the remainder of your Customer Design Summary in a 2- to 3-page Microsoft® Word document.

 

West Consulting Network Design Summary

West Consulting Business Description

 

West Consulting is a graphic design and printing company. It is growing in consumer and sales volume and therefore, is expanding its local campus in Houston, Texas and adding a test location in China.

Business Problem

As a graphics design and printing company, West Consulting runs bandwidth-intensive applications from servers housed at their headquarters in Houston, Texas. IT leadership has determined that the current network continuously runs in a degraded state and users experience heavy latency when accessing the servers that house their customer Computer Aided Design (CAD) software.

 

Due to increased sales of their CAD designs, they need to expand their facilities. The company headquarters currently has 1,000 unique users amongst their two buildings and has decided to add another building and 500 users.

 

In addition, leadership has decided to expand into China to enable them to test their designs in a new and growing market. The footprint in China will be relatively small; approximately 30 people.

Solution

You are a Network Consultant for West Consulting. You are tasked with proposing an improved network design to support their growth and expansion plans.

Requirements

1. A secure WLAN solution in the new building for half of the users and recommendations to upgrade their existing WLAN infrastructure to keep wiring costs down.

2. Recommendations on a Unified Communications system that meets traffic demands, with minimal interruptions, due to the frequency of international videoconferencing calls that will occur.

3. An IP solution that can accommodate the new users in all locations.

4. Recommendations to upgrade their switch bandwidth to 10GB fiber uplinks between backbone switches, a 10GB connection to each of the servers, and add-in options for redundancy. High availability access to these critical servers is a must because of the expected traffic increase and load on the servers.

5. Proposal for a data center solution that takes advantage of both network and server virtualization technologies to reduce their costs in acquiring and maintaining hardware.

6. Improvements to the link speed to the internet.

7. Options for implementing greater security for their Intranet servers that their partners and employees heavily use and for their overall network infrastructure, as they have had attacks on their DMZ.

8. Have proof that these improvements will be completed within a 4- to 6-month timeline.

Network Configuration Details

The Network Engineer verbally shared the configuration details of their network, as follows:

Headquarters:

· Bldg. 1 and Bldg. 2 are located about 1000 ft. apart.

Switches:

· Bldg. 1 has one 6500 backbone switch installed; which supports users from both buildings.

· Bldg. 2 has a connection to the backbone switch via a 10GB fiber connection (10G Base LR) from uplink port on a Cisco 3850.

· To support the users, each floor contains three Cisco Catalyst 48-port 100Mbps Ethernet switches; which are each cabled to the backbone switch via a 1GB uplink port.

Routers:

· Each floor represents a different subnet and therefore one Cisco router 2610, configured with EIGRP, is cabled to backbone switch (1GB connection) to provide routing for each subnet and provides a WAN interface to the Internet via a T-1 link.

· Each switch also has a link to an access point that uses WPA encryption and 802.11b wireless standard to support users who are in conference/meeting rooms that want to connect to the internet.

Servers:

· 5x Windows® Server 2012 R2 (RAID 5) application servers that support the CAD.

· 1 DHCP and FTP server

 

IP Configuration (DHCP-based)

Building	Floor	Servers	Clients	IP Network
1	1	5	100	194.100.1.0/24
	2		100	194.100.2.0/24
	3		100	194.100.3.0/24
	4		100	194.100.4.0/24
	5		100	194.100.5.0/24
2	1	5	100	195.100.1.0/24
	2		100	195.100.2.0/24
	3		100	195.100.3.0/24
	4		100	195.100.4.0/24
	5		100	195.100.5.0/24