Networks Systems & Technologies - Essay Example

The firm also has a traveling sales force which needs to connect to the office network to access the sales applications and other administrative applications. The network users include managers, designers, sales, finance staff and secretaries. From the perspective of IT users and network spread, this can be called as a medium scale company network. The overall IT strategy would be simple and would include the following elements for us to consider – The company network would follow a two-layered architecture (Figure 2) with the head office & factory in the top layer and other 3 offices in the second layer connected to the network backbone.

All offices would be connected to each other through a Wide Area Network (WAN) (Figure 1). Users in the individual offices would be connected to the network through a Local Area Network (LAN) forming a “Star Network” (Figure 3) going into the Ethernet Hub. The Ethernet Hub would be connected to the router. The other offices would be connected via routers to the network backbone and supported remotely from the head office. This type of architecture is chosen because majority of users are in the head office and factory.

For the company wide access to various applications and systems, an Active Directory Server system will need to be used. An Active Directory server will be installed at every location and will have to be identified as a Global Service Catalog (containing all user information), DHCP, DNS Server and Domain Controller. This will enable all offices to have network connectivity even when the WAN network lines to other offices are down. The storage of servers and cables as well as the individual speeds are also part of the overall network design but slightly technical in nature.

The types of servers needed will be determined by the applications and other infrastructure management tools which will be used within the company. A category 6 data cable will be used to