River Davis IT-212 Module 3 Milestone one 03/23/2024
I have been asked to conduct research on the new office set up project in Fayetteville, NC with 50 employees which includes a new executive vice president of sales and marketing and provide a report for the team with setups for them to consider and recommendations for the network infrastructure. This location will need to have access to fiber optic cables, T1 internet service providers and must be able to support live video teleconferencing calls with employees based at other locations. It will also need to be able to send jobs to the billboard printers located in the company headquarters in Albany. In order to transport data and communication media we will need fiber optic cables and Virtual Private Network (VPN) would be the best for data transportation. (Veloce, 2023) The OSI stack consists of 7 layers of a network: Layer 1 - The physical layer is comprised of the hardware required to have a functioning network. Layer 2 - The Data link layer - transfers data and handles error correction from the physical layer. Layer 3 - Network layer - manages device addressing, identifies the best paths for data to transfer and handles packet routing. Layer 4 - Transport Layer - Ensures complete data transfer and manages end-to-end communication sessions. Layer 5 - Session layer - establishes, maintains, and terminates communication sessions between devices. Layer 6 - Presentation Layer - Translates data formats and encrypts/decrypts data for the application layer. Layer 7 - Application layer - provides network services to the application of the user. Some of the hardware that we will need in order to establish and maintain the network are as Follows: Fiber optic cable, T1 internet service providers, router, switch, modem, firewall, access point, Network Interface Cards (NICs), ISDN Terminal Adapters and ATM switch. A common practice is to use subnetting to efficiently allocate IP addresses within a larger network. For 50 employees, I recommend a subnet with a /26 prefix length, as it provides up to
62 usable IP addresses (64 total minus 2 for the network and broadcast addresses). This allows for future additional network devices. (Cooper & Cooper, 2021) When setting up a network, you need to decide which topology to use. The ones provided in this document are the most common. The first topology is a BUS topology. This is where all devices are connected to a single central cable. This can slow down speeds and connectivity, so I do not recommend this topology. The next is the STAR topology which connects multiple devices to a central hub or switch. There is also the RING topology which connects devices in circular fashion, and data travels in one direction. Each device has two neighbors for communication purposes. Though this is one of the easier topologies to troubleshoot, it's not one that I would consider unless absolutely necessary. The final topology is MESH, in which every device is connected to every other device in the network,