Network Design Project- A Case Study on Everlast Athletics

Questions: 1. Explain how you will address Mr. Smiths desire to move towards a virtualized server environment and how you will leverage cloud based solutions to streamline management of business needs. 2. What media will you use to connect the LANs in each location? What media will you use to interconnect the LANs? Answers: 1. Address Mr. Smiths desire to move towards virtualized server The CEO of the Everlast Athletics, Michael Smith, desired to move all the activities of the www.riddellsports.com from Dallas to Philadelphia and implement the virtual cloud server in the new domain www.everlast.com. The Everlast Athletics in Philadelphia has recently purchased the Riddle Sports Company. The CEO desired to operate the whole business operations from the corporate office in Philadelphia. The Dallas regional office will be connected via Everlasts corporate WAN (Wide Area Network). The Everlast Corporate Office will be using whole office building for hosting activities. To have total access to the regional office in Dallas, it needs to be securely connected to the corporate network of Everlast. The CEO also expresses his desire to make the website available to its customer nationwide and 24x7. The two offices in Philadelphia need to connect to a LAN (Local Area Network), and in the case of server failure, the CEO needs a backup internet connection in the office. Leveraging the Cloud Server to meet business needs Leveraging the Cloud Server for the business will help in fulfilling the business requirements for the Everlast Athletics. The cloud server will appear as the single access point for all the employees in both Dallas and Philadelphia. By leveraging the cloud, the Everlast Athletics needs to deploy SaaS (Software as a Service). SaaS will allow the Everlast to pay for storage and the software as required (Dinh et al. 2013). Implementing the cloud computing and having the peer-to-peer connection between all the servers in the corporate offices will facilitate the business requirements. With the use of cloud servers, the Everlast can reduce their cost on the existing server based system. Leveraging the cloud server will simplify the business processes eliminating the resource management issues (Chang et al. 2013). Reliability will be maintained in the data access and network from the servers in the Philadelphia. Furthermore, the virtual cloud server will accomplish the CEOs desire to have flexibility in outsourcing from the Dallas regional office. Since all the application will be on a single cloud server, it will become active in collaborating the corporate website for both the companies (Garg et al. 2013). Implementing the cloud server, the customers of both the companies can access the site nationwide and 24x7. Furthermore, the virtual server will eradicate the need for the physical storage in the corporate office. Thus, it can be concluded that the virtual cloud server will help in streamlining management of the business needs. 2. Media used to connect the LANs in both locations The Everlast Athletics will have their main server in Philadelphia and their regional office in Dallas. The two offices have their regional, local area network. In order to efficiently manage the business activities of both the offices from the corporate head office in Philadelphia, the two LAN in two different cities needs to be securely connected. To establish a reliable connection between the two regional LANs, VPN or Virtual Private Network is used (Manion et al. 2013). Figure 1: Connection of both LANs using VPN (Source: Singh et al. 2015, pp-103) The two private local networks of Philadelphia and Dallas are liked by VPN over the public network namely Internet. Two Firewall need to be purchased for security and establishment of the network system is done via IPsec tunnel. The data packets will be encrypted in both the ends to ensure security. In this way, the employees of the regional office at Dallas will able to access the website having secured communications. Media used to interconnect the LANs In Philadelphia the two LANs in the two buildings are connected over single switch using Cat 5e. Using Cat 5e in connecting the two LAN will increase the traffic capacity to about 1000Mbps speed (Jain Paul 2013). Using the switches in connectivity will treat the segmented LAN connection as a whole. Connecting the existing 65 workstations on the second floor of the corporate office with the 30 workstations is made with Switching Hubs. Connecting the LANs with Switches more than one frame can be transmitted through the network thus increasing the overall traffic speed over the network. Figure 2: Interconnected LANs (Source: Jain Paul 2013, pp-29) Since the two LAN are situated 285 ft apart, using the switch in connecting the network will avoid the collision of data frames. The each port in the switching network is separated by collision domain. Moreover, in addition to the internet access, the dedicated LAN connection over the switches will assist in a backup procedure in case of server failure. Thus, it can be concluded that connecting the LAN with the switches will fulfill the business requirements. References Chang, V., Walters, R. J., Wills, G. (2013). The development that leads to the Cloud Computing Business Framework.International Journal of Information Management,33(3), 524-538. Dinh, H. T., Lee, C., Niyato, D., Wang, P. (2013). A survey of mobile cloud computing: architecture, applications, and approaches.Wireless communications and mobile computing,13(18), 1587-1611. Garg, S. K., Versteeg, S., Buyya, R. (2013). 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