Network Infrastructure

EZY-Books is a professional publisher who does customized publication of books. In current times of age, each and every business is craving for IT services to support its business processes. EZY is not an exception. Indeed, in this twenty-first century, IT has become the driver of every business in every street, city country, continent and the whole world.

For EZY-Books to survive in the present competitive business environment, it has to improve on its service delivery processes. Information Technology is the deliverer of our mention company.

In this article we will be proposing IT infrastructure services required to salvage the situation of EZY-Books environment. Such IT infrastructure include but are not limited to file sharing, data processing, internet as a service, mailing and messaging and network services.

Network infrastructure refers to the software and hardware resources of a whole network which enables network communication, management connectivity and operations of a business networked environment.  That is to say, network infrastructure provides services and communication path amongst applications, users, processes and the external internet. Our proposed network design structure comprises the following key areas to be provided with solutions.

Instant information availability obviously makes it faster for decision making amongst the administration team. This does not only improve the performance and service delivery process of any business enterprise.

Instant communication can only be achieved with real time systems. For our business case study, we propose to have a means of communication that will be relying messages from the sender to the recipients in a real time manner.

To implement the above goal, we have a dedicated mail and messaging server that will be handling the service. The server will be kept at the head quarter in Sydney. The mail server will be handling mail delivery and reception. On the other hand, messaging service is necessary as the customers may want to have live chat with company representatives in quest for information.  The two services will provided unified communications as messages will reach the recipient in time and just in case there is action to be taken then it will be taken in time (Anderson, 2015).

MDaemon is proposed to be our software resource to manage mail and messaging IT infrastructure services.

A LAN (local-area network) refers to a computer network which spans a moderately small area. Most of the time a LAN confines to single room or at a times a building. LANs are usually connected to other LANs.  In most cases, LAN enables connection of devices. This enables communication, data exchange and integration of experiences.  LAN has home, personal, public, offline, storage and embedded systems network types.

LAN

A home LAN is used to integrate computing components in homes connecting them to the internet. A home enables everybody in a home to access files that are shared on their personal computing devices. Office network on the other hand denotes to wireless and wired kind of network the office location. It offers workers and systems a means of collaboration, communication and data sharing.  We propose to have such a type of LAN for our EZY-Books company.

Personal network is a network for a single user, public network creates a public Wi-Fi network that allows internet connection. Public Network will be used to supplement of LAN. This will be purposely meant for visitors and customers.

In any computing environment, network cables are deployed to link and transfer information among routers, computers storage area networks and switches. The cables really required as they are basically the media through which information flows.

For our EZY-Book IT infrastructure, we propose to use different types of cables for communication purposes. The appropriateness of a kind of cable will vary on the basis of the topology and structure of the entire layout of our proposed network.

Twisted pair cable will be our commonly used commonly used cable. In our LAN networks, we will concentrate on twisted copper cable for data communication. The twisted cables comprise of four pairs of copper conductor or wires which are also enclosed in insulation material. The pairs are further twisted into a number of twists. The twists are necessary as they prevent interference other adjacent cables and devices.

Fibre optic is another kind of cabling that we are going to implement. In our high bandwidth areas such as data centers where high capacity is required, we will be required to use fibre optic kind of cabling.

Other types of media necessary in this times is wireless connection. In our proposed design, wireless media is necessary to allow wireless handheld devices to access the internet. Wi-Fi will have to be used to allow guests and customers have an access to our network.

In our network structure layout, it is important to remember that, our child branches located in different towns have to be accessible via the internet. Cabling media mentioned above will not assist. A WAN interconnection will help.

WAN denotes to a physically dispersed private telecommunication network which interlinks multiple LANs. In our EZY-Books enterprise, a WAN will consist of linking Sydney- the head quarter and branches (Brisbane and Melbourne). The router will be used to connect the LANs to the WAN. EZY-Books enterprise WAN will allow the employees to share access to services, applications and some centrally located service resources. This technology will not only eliminate the need for installation of the same firewall or application in multiple locations. For instance, it will be so expensive to install Mdaemon to each branch. Hence, the application will only installed at the headquarter (Sydney).

Cabling Media for Communication Purposes

To implement a WAN, will be using a virtual private network facility. The Virtual Private Network will facilitate the connection between our WAN sites. That is to say, connection between Melbourne-to-Sydney-to-Brisbane (Neves, et al., 2014).

It is important to mention that we will be using IPsec VPN to continuously have open site-to-site connections. In addition, we will be using SSL VPN for enabling remote connections for individual user computers. This will enable huge data transfer in a secured manner.

Direct fibre optic link could have the best option for WANs due to its greater reliability, security and performance as compared to virtual private networks. However, cost will be our major hindrance.

Remember that, WAN infrastructure will be leased as a service from our internet service provider.

MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) will be our WAN type of connection that we will be using.

A network service refers to a function that the network infrastructure provides in order to offer value to business processes.

For our EZY-Books enterprise, the following networked services have to be implemented to offer value for our business processes.

1. Voice over IP: this networked service denotes to a technique and a number of technologies for delivery of voice multimedia sessions and communications over Internet Protocol networks. Voice over IP works by changing sound to digital voice communication then it sends via Internet broadband. EZY-Books really requires VoIP for ease of communication.
2. WWW: World Wide Web refers to system of interconnected, hypertext documents retrieved via Internet. The service is managed by Hyper-text transfer protocol. EZY-Books require WWW for access of its information by customers at comfort of their zones rather than travelling to EZY-Books premises.

• Intranet: an intranet denotes to private network which is contained in an enterprise. Computers connected to the LAN are the ones able to access the intranet as service. Intranet will be required by EZY-Books to avail information to users within the company.

1. Extranet: EZY-Books will require extranet as a network service to securely share a portion of EZY-Books’ information to the vendors, partners, public businesses and suppliers.
2. Email: messages will have to be sent using the SMTP protocol. The user mail will be delivered to m-sender mail server from an m-receiver mail server. The final server will then send the mail to the appropriate mailbox. The client will the download the email.
3. Hardware sharing: EZY-Books need to have hardware sharing as a network service. Shared hardware will include printers and scanners.

• DNS: Domain Name as a service, will be required to perform name resolution purpose.
• DHCP: Dynamic Host Configurations Protocol will be used to manage IP addressing(Dong-dong, et al., 2015).

Data processing denotes to the manipulation of data input with an application software to output desired output as a graphic, text data file, or video/audio.

Cloud storage refers to cloud computing model stores information on the Internet via a cloud computing supplier. The provider operates and manages data cloud data storage as a service. EZY-Books require cloud storage which saves them purchase of data storage and management of the data store (Marie & Keith, 2013).

Client/server system will be used in data processing for EZY-Books. Technically, the C/S system puts application near to the user increasing the performance. EZY-Books will benefit from the latest improvement in the not only pricing but also performance features of computer nodes together with capabilities (Mehedi, et al., 2014).

In this article, we have been offering a solution to EZY-Books business enterprise in terms of Information Technology Infrastructure services. Our main areas covered network infrastructure, network services and data processing. These are the major areas that EZY-Booking has been having a challenge with customer relations.

References

Anderson, P., 2015. Network Infrastructure Configuration. IEEE Journal On Selected Areas In Communications, 27(3), pp. 249-256.

Dong-dong, Zhang, C.-r., WangZi-xuan, Z.-y. & Yu, W.-b., 2015. Research on Networked Collaborative Technical Service of Manufacturing Enterprise in Cloud Computing Environment. Amsterdam, Atlantis Press.

Marie, B. & Keith, K., 2013. How Do We Make School Network Infrastructure Affordable? Together! as Districts Adopt 1-to-1 or BYOD, They Need to Adapt New Ways of Financing and Maintaining Their Networks. T H E Journal (Technological Horizons In Education), 7(8), pp. 65-71.

Mehedi, M., HassanBiao, Shamim, S. & Alamri, H., 2014. Efficient Resource Scheduling for Big Data Processing in Cloud Platform. New York City, Springer.

Neves, P., Soares, J. & Sargento, S., 2014. Media Independent Handovers: LAN, MAN and WAN Scenarios. s.l., IEEE Globecom Workshops.