Project Background
Please reference Figure 1. Friendly Care Hospital is one of the biggest hospitals in DC. You have recently bought the hospital, naming it [Your Firstname Lastname] Hospital. For example, Jane Doe Hospital. Jane Doe Hospital owns a 5-story building and houses many departments that span multiple floors. Its Radiology department is spread across the first and second floors, connected by a dedicated local area network (LAN). The department has recently deployed a new “Radiology Images” application as part of their initiative to digitize patient records. However, the department staff sometimes faces long application delays during busy hours. It also experiences regular delays in Internet connectivity, FTPS services, web services, and email services.
Their original design, depicted in Figure 1, was categorized as a small network, providing services for up to 200-500 devices. They have well surpassed this. You, as their senior network administrator, are tasked with the job of a complete re-design. This design must support a medium to large sized network for over 1,000 devices. Thus, it should surpass the current capabilities.
Figure 1. Current Friendly Care Hospital Network Design
Overview
In this project, you will study performance improvements in a congested, wired LAN/WAN environment that can be solved to varying degrees by a new IT infrastructure design and fully functional implementation in Packet Tracer. To learn more about Packet Tracer please read the Cisco Packet Tracer DS PDF. Later, in Phase II of the project, you will scale this design to a larger enterprise IT infrastructure.
To begin the projects, you will complete a review of related literature to identify what is appropriate to improve system feasibility, RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability), security, and disaster recovery of the existing IT infrastructure and model of your hospital. Once this review of literature is complete, you will use the outcomes and research results to advance and improve the IT infrastructure. Proper data analysis, comparison, and contrast will be summarized within in-text tables and figures as well as appendixes to explain the results of the IT infrastructure re-design and improvement.
Packet Tracer is limited given it is a simulator. Be creative! For instance, if Packet Tracer does not have a file sharing service for a file sharing server, turn on any other related and relevant services that are available. As another example, use LAN and WAN protocols that are optimal given what the version of Packet Tracer allows. You will be assessed based upon optimal configurations in the version of Packet Tracer used. Thus, assure this is well studied. Research will outline new opportunities for future IT infrastructure designs, and this should be discussed accordingly in the written paper even if not configured in Packet Tracer. Often, new technologies are not implemented in industry immediately due to limitations such as hardware architecture.
Please verify all requirements are met by reviewing the grading rubric. Below is an outline of minimum requirements with examples and ideas.
Instructions
Minimum Project Requirements
· Submit a working Packet Tracer lab, typically this file has a .pkt file extension.
· This will include the fully operational new IT infrastructure design
· All devices in the lab must be named with your first name and last name
· Example: Jane_Doe_Router_1
· All hardware and software should be configured properly and should be able to communicate using optimized networking designs, configurations, and protocols
· No devices should have passwords for assessment purposes
· Minimum IT Infrastructure Design and Packet Tracer Requirements
· You must start with a blank/new Packet Tracer file, existing labs or modified labs of existing solutions will receive a zero without exception
· Design a medium-size hospital IT infrastructure for well over 1,000 devices, and scalable beyond the Figure 1 example
· For example, a design that goes beyond traditional N-Tier designs
· Design proper addressing via IPv4 and/or IPv6 that scales