Chapter 12 Network Design The holding company that owns NDAS has just purchased a regional trucking company called Sunshine Trucking (ST). NDAS believes that ST offers a way to build revenues in an area in which it has experience (package delivery), even though ST will not operate directly with NDAS. ST focuses on large commercial shipments (e.g., food products for wholesalers, packaged goods for department stores). At present, ST has a very poor data communications network. Because you have done such a good job on the NDAS network, President Coone offers your expertise to ST to help with their new network. ST operates three regional shipping hubs: Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta. Each of these regional hubs is responsible for taking shipping requests from customers and scheduling pickups and deliveries. Each regional hub has about four dozen computers are networked to each other using a small LAN and need to be connected onto a WAN. The computers access the network server (a Windows NT file server) and the corporate minicomputer (see below) almost constantly. The current LAN is a 10 Mbps Ethernet that is beginning to become overloaded with the network traffic. The regional hubs communicate with one another fairly regularly via a VPN connection, usually a dozen times an hour. The Atlanta hub also houses the corporate head office and therefore has an additional 20 computers for use by corporate staff. This office also has the corporate minicomputer that processes all accounting data (a UNIX computer). There has been some discussion about establishing a corporate Web site, but no plans have been made. ST has a series of seven local offices for short-term storage, truck maintenance, and managing the local drivers: Houston, New Orleans, J ackson, Birmingham, Tallahassee, Charlotte, and Memphis. Each regional office has 5 to 10 computers that are peer networked together but need to be connected to the WAN. These computers have fairly minimal networking requirements. At present, each local office sends data to the corporate minicomputer at the end of each day by sending one diskette via overnight courier (NDAS). ST would like to automate this process so that it can transmit the data via a network. ST also would like to enable the local offices to communicate with all the regional hubs (and perhaps with one another) but do not anticipate needing to send a large amount of data. Exercises 1. Based on your assessment of the large number of changes that need to occur, you quickly realize that you dont have the time to design and implement the new network yourself. Thus, you suggest that a vendor help with this project. Being a nice guy though, you volunteer to create an RFP which will be sent ou t to some local networking vendors for their consideration. Using the outline provided in Figure 12-6, create an RFP for STs new network. Keep in mind that you need to think about their network at the LAN, MAN, WAN, and BN levels.