Suppose that you are appointed to lead a project of a computer network design in your organization that contains many sites that need to be integrated into a single corporate private network, what are you going to do? As a team leader, a time-frame project as general needs to be developed first that includes the brainstorming to collect data as much as possible, the blueprint project, budget forecasting, liaising with the third parties and so on.It’s quite difficult to start a project properly without knowing exactly what the strengths and weaknesses of supporting infrastructure which the system will base on. It is therefore, a computer network design should start by brainstorming to collect data as much as possible.
Assume this computer network design will involve three sites: one main headquarter office in Sydney, one main office in Jakarta, and one remote site – the gold mine in the middle of the Borneo jungle. The principal of the organization would like to have all the sites linked to a single corporate computer network to allow inter-sites communication including data, voice, or probably video conference and off course to allow easy communication with the whole world.
Telecommunication Requirements
The first data for your computer network design that needs to be collected is the telecommunication system requirements. The main question is how to link all of the sites to allow system communication to happen. The following questions can be used to collect the data for the telecommunication requirements.
1. How to arrange the Telecommunication service in remote site? We understand that both the main offices in Sydney and Jakarta are located in the area where you can find lots of communication services. What about the remote site – the site in the middle of the jungle? You should liaise with the third party company that can provide WAN services technology - probably uses the satellite link communication.
2. Collect the information what kinds of communication will be allowed for remote site to the Jakarta office: data only, voice, video, or combination of those. This information is important to help you determine how wide the satellite link bandwidth you need. This will relate to the budget since satellite link is expensive.
3. What kind of WAN technology to link data between Jakarta and Sydney, frame relay, ISDN network, VPN connection? Liaising with the third party – the telecommunication company will help.
You need to dig and find more data that specific to the project. Telecommunication requirements should be sorted out first before you can proceed to collect other infrastructure requirements in this case.
Network Infrastructure Requirements
Second requirement for your computer network design is to collect data regarding the network infrastructure requirements. All related data for both logical and physical infrastructure requirements must be collected as much as possible. The following questions can be used to collect the data.
1. How many hosts will be in each site including workstations, servers, switches, routers, wireless access points, and VoIP. This will help in calculating and designing the IP address requirements.
2. Collect the information with the principal management if they need to host public resources either in Sydney or Jakarta sites. If so, where will all the public resources be located, inside the private network or in the DMZ (perimeter network)? This will help in designing the entry-point security. By hosting public resources, domain name must be designed in a secure manner such as separating the domain naming between internal and public usage.
3. Collect the information regarding the security requirements for internal network. Will particular sections or departments need security boundary? This will help in designing your computer network if the network segmentation within the local network is needed. And also helps in designing how the users are grouped and appropriate policies are developed to comply with the security requirements.
4. Collect the information with the principal management to develop service level agreements regarding the availability of the network resources. How critical the network resources will affect the business continuity if they ever fail to function. This will help you design the requirements of the redundant resources such as the need of clustering, load balancing and so on.
5. Collect the information regarding the location in each sites such as how good the power is, how long the distances between each building that will connect to the network, is it feasible to run the network cabling or wireless connection. If the wireless connection is needed, examine how the attenuation factors will affect the wireless performance.
6. Collect the information if the travelling users or tele-workers will be allowed to access the corporate network resources. This will help you design your VPN requirements and the security requirements regarding the authentication and the authorization for remote connection.
7. And still more diggings needed regarding the infrastructure requirements that is specific to the project. By having the brainstorming data regarding the infrastructure requirements you can make the budget regarding the hardware, software, and consultants requirements for the implementation of your computer network design.
Disaster Management
In your computer network design, the disaster recovery and business continuity planning should be in mind. The what if this fail question should base all the decisions of your design including selecting the location, hardware, software, models, the third party involves and so on. For example in building the server room, it’s a wise decision not to populate all the servers into a single main server room. Another alternate server in different building would be much better to avoid a single point of failure in case of the main server room is totally burned in fire disaster. The draft diagram of the computer network design should be evaluated precisely. Risk security assessment must be performed to help you design the appropriate control to reduce the possible threats to occur and if the threats ever occur, what actions must be taken to allow the business to run at least in the minimum operational level.
In your computer network design should also consider the easiness in maintaining the system later by the administrators by providing a comprehensive documentation including the operational manuals and disaster recovery planning.
