C1006 Computer Networks Term 3 2007 Assignment – Part 2
III. My Small Office Network Overview
Here, I will give a general overview about my Small Office Network design.
Firstly, it is a 10Base-T Ethernet Network that operates on 10Mbps for its bandwidth, use star topology and UTP cabling. My network design is aimed for an office that needs the network to do some light to moderate computing activity such as general office administration activity, database processing, some Internet activity, etc., so this network is not designed to carry out a very heavy workload such as video processing, video and audio streaming or 3D graphic rendering that need a great computing and networking power as its main workload. But for some time we still can use this network to do some heavy work. When the business grows and need for greater networking performance, the network will just need some minor modification to support the developing office’s needs, because the technology used in this network is chosen with an eye towards developing technology and higher performance demand in the future.
Secondly, my network is using guided media, as we can see in my network diagram above, or we can say in another word, this is a wired network. So, this network is designated for an office with an environment that is fairly easy for cable installation. This kind of office may have the network installed just in few nearby rooms that makes it easier for us to run the network cables across the network. The cable used in this network is category 5 UTP (Un-shielded Twisted Pair) cable which use RJ-45 connectors (“RJ” stands for Registered Jack). More information about this cable will be discussed later.
More on, this network has an Internet connection. It uses the high speed DSL internet connection. That’s why we see a DSL modem in my small office network diagram. The advantages of using the DSL internet connection is that it provide the network with a dedicated Internet connection. It means that the network can always connected to the Internet at all times, supporting the office’s activity when the office need to use the Internet connection almost all the time for such activities like send or receive e-mail, provide real time support for the customer using chatting feature, advertise the company through websites, and much more possible activities that can be done by an office to get the most benefit from its dedicated Internet connection.
And then, we consider that this small office network design will be used for a new office’s first established network, so we just got few desktop computers in this network design. Because when we just started our small office, we may don’t need a lot of desktop computer to start with due to the fact that new small offices generally started in small scale with just few employees, so they won’t need a lot of computer at this time. But, although the new office just needs few computers now, this doesn’t mean that we set up a network that able to support just this small number of computer without ability to be expanded in the future. If the company’s small office grows in the future, this network should be able to support the expansion with just minor modification to some part of the network, without having to remove the entire network and replace it with all new networking devices. So, this network design will save the office’s money in the future.
As explained before that the network needs to be able to support the needs of a growing office in the future. So, here I build my network design’s topology based on the star topology which makes use of a switch as the central node which links all the other network devices in the network such as the desktop computers, server, and router. The switch also manages the data transmission between the devices that directly linked to it.
I choose this topology because star topology provides us with many advantages like:
a. Easy to add or remove computers in the network
If we want to add a new computer in the network with star topology, all we need to do is stretch a network cable from the new computer and plugs it into any available port in the switch. The similar thing also applies when we want to remove one computer from the network, just unplug the network cable of which computer we want to remove from the switch’s port, it’s so simple. This advantage is very useful for our network as it grows in the future. When we need more computers, we can just plug it into any available port in the switch.
b. The network is capable to support further expansion
As explained in the first advantage of star topology, we can easily add new computer to the network with just simply plug a network cable from the computer to any available port in the switch. But what happen if there is no more empty port in the switch, is it means that the network cannot support new computers anymore? The answer is no. If the switch has no more port, we can purchase a new switch, stack it on the old switch, plug the new computer in the new switch which still has plenty of empty port, and now our network has doubled its ability to support more computers in the network. It’s just that simple.
c. It’s easy to troubleshoot a network with star topology
In a network that uses star topology, every computer will have a point-to-point connection with the central switch. This will provide centralized monitoring of the network’s condition. So, if there is a problem in a computer, it will be easily detected, which make the troubleshooting process is faster and easier because its easier to know which computer that got a problem.
d. If there is a computer fail, the entire network won’t be affected
As explained in point c, every computer in this topology have a point-to-point connection to the central switch. If there is one computer failed to do its function due to some problems, it will not affect other computer in the entire network. Because the other computers are not connected directly to this computer, so they still can do their function normally, and also the network still works normally. This advantage is important because when the office’s staffs greatly depend on the network to do their works, they can work conveniently and won’t need to worry that the network will go down just because a trouble happens on one of the office’s computer.
e. It’s possible to use two or more kind of cable
In case that we need to use more than one cable type in our network, we can easily do it by using a switch that supports multiple kind of cable. But here in my small office network design for this assignment, we don’t use this kind of switch.
That’s for the advantages of star topology. But we need to be realistic that there is nothing perfect in this world. Even the star topology gives us so many useful advantages; we also need to take a look at what are the disadvantages of the star topology that I use in my small office network design, although it is just a few minor disadvantages.
The few minor disadvantages of the star topology are:
a. The network’s dependency on the switch
Due to the fact that all the computers in the network is connected directly to the switch that act as the central of the network, if there is a damage or error that causes the switch fail to do its function, the entire network will fail and no network activity can be carried out. But the possibility for this kind of network failure is very small as long as we provide adequate network security and proper maintenance to the switch. Also, by choosing a switch from a trusted brand in the market, we will get a guaranteed quality for the switch, thus this kind of switch has passed some quality test, so we can trust our network switch’s choice to these kinds of switches. So, the possibility of total network failure because of the switch fault is very small.
b. Higher cost of equipment and cables
To build our network with a star topology, we will need to spend more money to buy the cables and the switch. Star topology needs a quite big amount of cables, because every computer needs to have its own network cable to link it directly to the switch. Also there are some other network topologies that don’t need a central controller like a hub or a switch, so we will spend more money to buy the switch in order to implement the star topology in our network. But, as we now that nowadays computer and networking technology is advance faster and faster, so what is expensive yesterday will become cheaper today. The category 5 UTP cable that I use in my small office network design maybe is a pricy thing one or two years ago, but now it’s a cheaper thing and reachable for the budget of a small office network. The same thing also applies for the switch, where some years ago people still using the hub in a star topology network and consider using a switch is too expensive, but nowadays a lot of people start to use the switch that give them better performance for their star topology network, and then switches started to flooding the market that result in obvious down pricing for many switch products. (Wikipedia, 2007). After all, let’s not worrying too much about the higher cost of establishing a star network; otherwise, let’s see that above all the price of the equipment that we need to provide, we will get a network that is not just very reliable to support all the activities of our small office but also a network that is easy to use, easy to expand, easy to troubleshoot, and very convenient for the office’s working climate because we don’t have to worry about a bit trouble like a failure on one computer, for this kind of small problem will leave the entire network unaffected. So, we can conclude here, why we won’t pay just a bit more if we can get a far better result for our network? We won’t regret our decision to use the star topology for our small office network.
That’s all about the advantages and disadvantages of the star topology that I used in my small office network design. Because I see that star topology has so many advantages that are useful for a small office network, so I choose this topology for my network design.
The last thing I would like to explain in this part of my assignment is that my small office network is designed using client-server environment. That’s why we can see a server computer in my small office network diagram. Actually there are two types of networking environment, the peer-to-peer network and the client-server network which I use in my network design. In a peer-to-peer network, each computer in the network act both as server (share resources) and client (use resources), while in a network with client-server environment, there is one server computer that shares its resources to be used by the client computers. So, here in my network design, the desktop PCs act as the clients that use the shared resources from the server computer. Actually, both peer-to-peer and client-server have their own advantages and disadvantages. Peer-to-peer network has its power in the network’s management simplicity and relatively cheap to start. But the weakness of peer-to-peer network is that the computers is burdened by double function as server and client at the same time and it also hardly support growing network, because it just works well in small, non-growing network. On the other hand, the client-server based network has its power in the centralized network management, better network security, higher network performance and wider network service capabilities as the server has a powerful computing power, and the important thing is that client-server based network have the capability to support growing network because it can works well even there are many client computers in the network. The weakness of the client-server based network is just that it needs higher starting cost to provide the server and also if the server fail, which is rarely happen due to the good quality of the server, the entire network will also fail to function.
After considering both the power and weakness of each kind of network types, I decided to use the client-server based network in my small office network design. Because as I said before, we will use this network for business activities, and everyone always want their business to grow further in the future, so we must anticipate the network’s grow. Additionally, using the client-server based network is the correct choice for networks in business fields, beside the fact that it provide ability to support growing network, the better security and performance provided by a client-server based network will increase the company’s productivity (Enterprise Technology, Inc., 2000). For example of the benefit from using the client-server based network for the office’s activities is that we can organize all the office’s files in the server, so every time when an office’s staff want to use a file, he/she will easily locate the needed file because all files are centralized in the server, beside that, we still can get many other benefits like we can set the security setting for the whole network just from the server, we can easily make a backup of the office’s data just by backing up the server data, etc.
This is the end of the third part of this assignment. In this part I had given the general overview of my small office network design. So we can have the general understanding about my network design. In the next part, I will explain every parts and devices in my network design, based on each parts and devices that we seen in my small office network diagram.
To be continued in the next post….
Do you have any comment on this? maybe you have something to ask me or want to discuss with me about this?Or maybe you are IDIC student and taking this module also?
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