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Design Project Helpful Hints

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by navin_anand

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Hi,
I am grad student working on a project based on a proposal to design a Communications Network for an Hypotetical University, which ahs about 20000 Staff/Students in it and the university is spanned over 5 geographically different locations. TheProposal needs are to integrate the Voice, Data and Multimedia. The design involves to segregate the load on different LAN's for different Depts.

My assumptions were to use 99.999% availability and to expect the deisgn to manage the increase forthe next five years, I did calculate the projected load in five years and from that I calculated the load in each dept. At this point I am not sure how to proceed and how to select what kind of switch will be good for this big a project and how manyrouters to design.

Can anyone provide me with a sample proposal or any helpful hints where to go from here.

Thanks in Advance
Navin

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by quintar51

I don't have the full answer, but perhaps some of my suggestions will do.

I would recommend sorting it out by locations. Take a look at each location you have, and determined first how it should connect to other locations. Remember that the longer the distance, the more expensive the connection. Meaning, you should not use a T1 connection between Boston and LA. Usually 128 kbps or 56k link is enough, but again, it depends on the situation. Also, use VPN where possible. You might as well use the internet to get where you're going rather than pay long distance charges.

Once you have established your WAN connectivity, then plan for redundancy. Meaning, if one connection should fail, you'll another connection available. Usuallythis means have 2 or more switches at each location.

You then want to think about LAN connectivity. You want more than 1 router, again, for fault tolerance. More than 1 DHCP, DNS, and WINS server. With 4000 students per location, you don't want 1 machine taking the full load.

hope that helps you out a little.

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