The Marine Explorer is a new four-deck ship to be used by marine biologists for studying fish and plant life in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship is to be equipped with both cable and wireless network access on all decks. Several work areas of the ship have stationary desktop computers, printers, and large-format printers that will be connected by cable. The top two decks will each have 15 desktops, two laser printers, and a large-format printer. The lower decks will have about 10 desktops each. Also, many of the ship’s scientists and technicians will use laptop computers, moving them to several different work locations on the ship. Windows 7, Linux, and Mac OS X Lion workstations will be used. The ship will have five servers for research and administrative use that will be housed in a server room on the top deck. You are retained through Network Design Consultants to work on the design of the network.

Creating a Preliminary Network Diagram

The scientist who is coordinating the network project would like you to create a general network diagram of the design ideas you have discussed to this point, showing the design principles for connecting cabled computers, printers, and plotters on each deck in the ship. Include in your diagram how you would isolate the servers on the network.