Silfinate Corporation Expansion to Three Remote Offices

Abstract

Silfinate Corporation will be adding three remote offices over the upcoming months. Determine the best topology and network design not only for each remote location but to ensure that each location is able to connect to the main office. There will be fifteen fulltime permanent employee cubicles along with space for up to ten other employees to work at any given time. Each location will also have four computers set up for customer usage. All employees will need access to all pertinent data regardless of which location they are currently at and if they are using assigned computer or guest computer.

Keywords: Expansion, Remote Office, Network Design

Silfinate Corporation Expansion to Three Remote Offices

To better serve their customer Silfinate will be expanding their presence in the local area by opening three remote locations in addition to the main office. The new remote locations have not been determined at this time, however, the following information is known. Each location will need to have fifteen full time permanent employees; locations for up to ten other Silfinate employees who will work remotely from the various locations, finally there will need to be four workstations in the client relations area. All employees will need to be able to access all pertinent data and files from anywhere on the company WAN including the customer relations areas.

The first area to be discussed is the basic network design and topology. The networks at each remote location will use a star-wired bus topology. There are several advantages and disadvantages to this choice, the largest drawback is the cost of hardware as there is a need for longer cable runs and more connectivity hardware is needed to implement this topology. The biggest advantages are the redundancy built in to this topology and the ability to cover longer distances should the need for expansion arise in the future. Once the locations are chosen and the site surveys are...