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Acme Company is a worldwide company with offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Miami, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro. Acme Company develops audio and video special effects for the entertainment and advertising industries. In Los Angeles, the corporate office, there are twenty-five people: six in accounting, two in sales, five executives, and eight in administration. The Chicago office has four people: two inside sales and two outside sales. The New York office has five people: three inside sales and two outside sales. The Miami office has four people: two inside sales and two outside sales. The London office has five people: three inside sales and two outside sales. The Frankfurt office has three people: one inside sales and two outside sales. The Tokyo office has five people: three inside sales and two outside sales. The Rio de Janeiro office has five people as well: one in marketing, two in sales and two designers. We are updating on designs and implementations of our networks for the new millennium, which include telephony, computers to handle our constant stream of multimedia between our offices. ACME has servers in the Los Angeles, New York, London and Tokyo offices, and all locations have Internet access and full telephone services, such as voice with conferencing and speed dialing. Business Problems Companies are constantly growing and moving forward with changes in the entertainment and advertising industries. Companies expand with increase in customer base, increase in personnel, increase in sales and demands, and increase of operating hours. The network structures are constantly changing to reflect and to accommodate company growth. Either more storage space has to ease the increase in customer database, or more help provided to give the customers what they want. Research has shown customers’ demands and designs relates to increased sales. Businesses have been changing from standard ‘eight to five’ to ‘always-open’, 24/7 to serve customers worldwide. Higher number of transactions, higher volumes of data transmitting back and forth between offices placed companies at risks for virus attacks as well as hackers unauthorized entrance into a company’s network making it vulnerable. Adding Virtual Private Networks and firewalls to the paths between the Internet and its Intranet helps to protect important company information. By issuing more back-ups to smaller offices will lower downtime if disaster hits. Transferring data simultaneously to hot-sites, or a third party site such as Iron Mountain, will lower down time as well. Finally, setting up mirror image sites for disaster recovery in areas like Los Angeles and Japan would counter their natural disaster pattern. ACME took some measures to make its network secure, such as adding symbols, numbers and letters into the equation as passwords for employees. Overview Voice Network No matter what line of business you are in and no matter how big or small your business may be, the telephone system is vital to a company’s success. It has to be simple and reliable, so that the business doesn’t have to spend unnecessary time and money taking care of it. And it has to be flexible so it can adapt to the needs as each business grows and changes. A PBX and a Centrex are the proposed solutions for this company. In choosing a PBX, the company had to make one of the most important business decisions that a company would have ever had to make, one that would directly impact employee productivity and the business overall. Centrex is a powerful, flexible communications system which can be tailored to fit the calling needs of each office and then change as your business grows. It’s like having all the benefits of an advanced flexible phone system, minus all the investment, maintenance and headaches that go along with owning and managing your own system. ACME has eight different offices that span across the globe. Each of the offices must be able to communicate via dialing a four digit extension or by direct dial. The Los Angeles office has been setup to use a PBX which will be the central host for all internal inbound calls. The PBX is connected to the Public Switched Network which has a direct connection to the outside world. Each of the other offices is either connected via a Point to Point ATM or a T3 connection. The type of connection is a dedicated line for each of the offices. London, Frankfurt, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Tokyo have been setup to use a Centrex in every individual office that is directly connected to each internal LAN in which all internal calls are routed via VoIP and routers. Data Network Overview Throughout each of the offices, depending on its needs, have certain requirements in order to function as a well oiled machine. Each office has a different setup because of the amount of people and its role that it plays for the company. Each of the eight will be discussed in further detail as to show how each is setup. The overall WAN for the company has been interconnected by high speed data lines that are capable of transmitting 25 MB of information in just a short amount of time. Each of the following offices; Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, and Frankfurt have been interconnected via the use of ATM. Every office has been setup for a 24 hour/7 days a week setup. In order to provide this type of service, dual ATM lines have been installed; one on a different MPOE to provide such redundancy. One of the two ATM lines that connect each office is the primary line and the other is a backup line that can be utilized in the event of an emergency outage. Each of the lines has a different service provider to ensure constant connection and reliability. Four of the eight offices that service the company, Chicago, Miami, Rio, and London are sales offices that are setup via a high speed T3 connection to a major hub of the WAN. The sales offices have a similar setup that can almost be mirrored to the larger offices. Each has a smaller scaled version of the larger offices. The four sales offices have been setup to be nearly maintenance free by providing dual T3 lines from two different carriers to each of the offices. With each of the offices now interconnected, they can show in detail how to justify and show cause for why each of the offices is connected in this fashion. The Los Angeles office is the headquarters for the company where all traffic and all major transactions for the company take place. The Los Angeles office consists of fifty seven people. There are five people in accounting, two in HR, two in IT, ten Executives, one in legal, two in marketing, ten in sales, and twenty five in Graphic Arts. In order to meet the needs of this amount of people, the network for the office has been arranged and configured in such a way as to provide the highest possible speed and with redundancy. Each of the workstations has been configured to utilize a gigabit Ethernet card and each is connected to a gigabit switch. Each of the servers in this facility has also been configured with a gigabit also in order to prove the highest possible transfer rate between server and workstation to allow large files to be transferred. Because of the amount of people and the size of the building, two server rooms were setup to provide service for both parts of the building. In order minimize the amount of bottlenecks between server rooms, a fiber line was run to connect each part to keep the network from slowing down at any given time. With the amount of critical information floating around the company via the network, a firewall has been setup to secure and block unnecessary traffic from the other offices and from the Internet also. The servers that are located at these sites handle data storage, email, the Intranet, accounting information, and basic network functions such as DNS, WINS, and DHCP for the clients. The data is backed up and off-sited by another company for safe keeping. The on-site intranet is managed and maintained here on this site. The data from this server is replicated to other intranet servers in Tokyo and in London to provide a redundancy and backup in the event that systems were to go down. Because each office has sales people with laptops the office has been setup with a VPN router to allow sales people to dial up and communicate with the other offices via email. Tokyo, London, New York City, and Frankfurt are setup quite similar but are a reduced version of the corporate office because of the amount of people. Each of the offices internally are connected using gigabit equipment, have high speed internet connections with a firewall protecting each office. London because of available IT staff can backup and off-site backup data at their facility. The other sales offices such as Rio, Chicago, Miami, and Frankfurt do not have such a high speed and redundant setup. Because of the amount of people, this did not justify the reasoning for setting up such a network but could be considered, but only if the company were to grow in the future. The types of protocols used within this company vary depending on what equipment and software utilized.
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