Mini Case

After interviewing the stakeholders of the Leonard Cooper Charter School the following issues was noted:

1. The first issue is with the print server. There are issues with management of print jobs and collisions on the print server. To help solve this problem the company needs to use a full- duplex switched Ethernet network. The Switched Ethernet dramatically improves network performance because each computer will have its own dedicated point-to-point circuit, rather than one common shared multipoint circuit like in traditional hub- based Ethernet. Since there are only two devices on each point-to-point circuit, the probability of a collision is lower. Using a 100Base- T switched circuit of about 95 Mbps. So the school can use up to about 95 percent of the switched Ethernet capacity before they have a problem with performance.

2. The second issue is the speed of the network. The school needs to switch to fiber cable delivering optical Ethernet. Fiber-optic is a digital transmission, so it permits higher transmission rates. Fiber- optic cable uses high-speed streams of light pulses from lasers or LEDs (light-emitting diodes) that carry information inside hair-thin strands of glass called optical fibers. It can carry huge amounts of information at extremely fast data rates. For the computers to use wireless we would have to set- up it up through a radio transmission. By making sure their laptops are wireless equipped they should have access to the network.

3. The third issue is the problem of connecting to the network. To improve the performance of the networks that are already in place the school needs to install disk drives that would give tem fast optimal performance. Slow hard disks give poor performance. Install RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks), they are used in applications requiring very fast processing of large volumes of data. By using RAID with symmetric multi-processing it can enable one server to use up to 16 CPUs. The school can also...