Case Study: Network Design for EZY-Books

EZY-Books is a specialised publisher for customised book publication services based in Brisbane. The company has recently purchased a two-story building in a Brisbane suburb as its new office. It will move about 40 employees to the new building.

The ground floor will be used for the teams of Marketing, HR, and other managerial duties (20 computers and 2 servers). The first floor will be used for the teams of Editorial, design and typography (25 computers and 1 server). The printing and production operation are outsourced to partners.

In addition, EZY-Books has settled its business at Sydney with a marketing team of 8 local employees (10 computers) located in a leased office.

Because of the new office site, EZY-Books hopes to have a future-proof network infrastructure deployed. The aim is to enable the easy and efficient connection of all devices, offices, staff, partners, and customers.

Assignment Task

You are a member of the network planning team, and need to write a technical report to explain your solutions and recommendations about the network plan for the new office building of EZY-Books.

Your target audience also includes executive business people, who have extensive business experience but limited ICT knowledge. Therefore, besides the technical design for the network, the report needs to explain why the recommended networking technologies/solutions are the most appropriate and how they will benefit their business. You may need to compare your recommendations with other available technologies.

Specifically, you should discuss possible solutions for the following 4 topics in the report.

Topic 1: The structured cabling plan for the new office building. You need to explain the key components included, as well as the recommendations for cable types and connecting devices.

Topic 2: IP addressing plan for the new office building.

With regards to IPv4 needs, the ISP has recommended the following topology diagram.

1. EZY-Books will continue using its current public IPv4 address, which is 120.154.191.2 (255.255.255.0) with the gateway as 120.154.191.1. The link is shown as the network interface between the router ISP and router R1.

2. R1 is the entry to the internal network of the company. R2 is recommended to provide better network segmentation. Private IPv4 addresses are used for the internal network. To simplify the discussion, each subnet uses a separate class C private network address (192.168.0.0/24, 192.168.1.0/24, 192.168.2.0/24, and 192.168.3.0/24).

3. PC1, PC2, and PC3 are computers inside each subnet. Please assign the last available IP address of each respective subnet to them.

4. The discussions for the IP addresses of servers are not required in the report.

5. Sydney office will keep its current network deployment and require no change. Therefore, it is excluded from the discussion.

Based on this diagram, provide the solutions for subnetting and IP assignment.

Your report needs to complete the following Addressing Table. If a field is not applicable, fill in "N/A".

You also need to use Cisco Packet Tracer to build the proposed topology. A screenshot of your PT drawing should be included in the report.

Topic 3: Essential network services

You also need to recommend some key network related services, addressing the following requirements:
1. Users should not configure their IP addresses manually. This becomes more important since some users take their own laptops to the company.
2. There are only a few public addresses available from the ISP. However, every device need to gain Internet access.

Topic 4: Network security

The owner and most staff have concerns about the security of their assets. You need to recommend the type of security policy and technologies that should be used.

Report Format

Your report should be no less than 1,500 words and it would be best to be no longer than 2,500 words long.

Attachment:- Task.rar