The EteX Company, which specializes in e-textbooks, is looking to provide redund

Question

The EteX Company, which specializes in e-textbooks, is looking to provide redundant data center capabilities from its home location of Boston to a co-location facility in San Antonio. Since all textbooks are sold and accessed through the Internet, any major disruptions lasting longer than 12 hours in computing services would have a significant impact on revenue and reputation. Therefore, the company wishes to have the capabilities of quickly responding to such disruptions in their data center via a remote facility. Should a disruption occur, the remote facility should be able to resume normal computing services within 8 hours. Each data center has a centralized storage device that can provide this level of replication via the network. The main storage device holds 10TB and the update interval to the remote data center is three times per day transferring 40GB of information. Design a basic but cost effective network solution that will provide the necessary communication channel(s) between the two data storage units for the data transfer three times a day. This should include but not be limited to the type of network media or services used; required networking equipment; topology; protocols and connection types used; and how it will be managed by a single network administrator.

Explanation / Answer

Preliminaries:

About the company

Name of the client:

EteX Comapany

Office Location:

The head office facility is located in Boston, USA and a Branch office at San Antonio

Nature of business:

E-Commerce based

Business domain:

Education and Publishing

Business Description:

The company sells e-textbooks services to its customers through its website hosted on its own servers

Existing IT Environment:

Each of the facilities at two different locations are equipped with a data center providing a centralised storage of information at each of the locations and the main storage capacity of each data server is 10Terabytes ,The remote data center is updated thrice a day at regular intervals. Each update takes 40 GB of network bandwidth usage and disk space of the data server as well making a total data transfer of 120GB (3 X 40GB) each day for updation.

Limitations/shortcomings of the existing environment:

The company sells the e-books to its customers through a website hosted on the internet. Since all the business activities of the company are dependent on the availability of the internet, any disturbance to the IT environment like unavailability of the internet access or system failures, or any other such major disruptions in the data center lasting more than the duration of 12 hours will result in the outages that affect the company’s revenue and reputation as well.

Functional Requirements of the Proposed network design

To provide a basic yet cost effective network solution to provide a necessary communication channel between the data storage terminals at each of the company’s data center facilities that provides an alternate solution for information update activities that take place at the transfer rate of 120 GB each day in three intervals.

Technical requirements:

The role of the network in the data center is becoming ever more crucial

Data Center

A data center is a computational resource and a repository of information which consists of all the equipment, software, and information to perform an IT based business activity. the following categories of components are present in a data center::

Data center network:

A data center network is the set of communication links which interconnect various assets of a data center with each other and with the outside world. Connections between data center resources should be as optimum (fast) as possible. This increases the overall processing speed of the data center. A data center's network serves as backbone of the organization .

Typically, data center hardware includes:

Desktops,Servers,Laptops etc.,

Routers, Switches,Modems ,Networking Cables

Hard drives, NAS,SAN,Backup disks

Power generators, HVAC systems, UPS

Printers,Keyboards,Monitors etc.,

Network topologies of data center:

Data centers topologies help to aggregate data and allow them to flow through the system in a fast and effective way by optimal organization of computing resources in the network.Topology of any type can be considered for establishing the data center networks, and some models have emerged for data center topology. For example, basic data center networks have a tree-based topology,The commonly used model of this type is "three-tier data center" network with three layers: access, aggregate and core. A "fat tree" architecture is related to this general model.

Other data center topologies include systems where one server "hub" is connected to many other servers or where different servers are cross-linked..A "leaf-spine" is such topology that adds various components to a central "spine layer" serving networks with heavy directional traffic.

Other topologies, like the BCube, are made for a modular or "shipping container" data center approach. A "flattened butterfly" approach operates on a more two-dimensional level than many of the "cube" topologies, for some energy savings.

Many of these are, in some ways, similar to other basic general network topologies, including the star, ring, hub or linear topologies, connect network components together.

Since the proposed network has a light traffic and the required network should be copst effective. Three-Tier Fat Tree topology is advisable as it can be managed by a single network administrator without any hassles as this is the simplest possible organisation of the components in the dta center network. that provides a scalable and optimal organisaation to meet the requirements of network communications in peak usage

Networking components used:

The components and technologies that make up data center networking generally include:

Protocols used:

DNS - Domain Name System - translates network address (such as IP addresses) into terms understood by humans (such as Domain Names) and vice-versa

DHCP - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol - can automatically assign Internet addresses to computers and users

FTP - File Transfer Protocol - a protocol that is used to transfer and manipulate files on the Internet

HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol - An Internet-based protocol for sending and receiving webpages

SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - A protocol for e-mail messages on the Internet

Ethernet - By far the most common protocol used at the physical layer is Ethernet such as 10BaseT or 100BaseTX specifies the type of cables that can be used, the optimal topology

Gigabit Ethernet-Gigabit Ethernet standard is a protocol that has a transmission speed of 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps). It can be used with both fiber optic cabling and copper.

Cabling types:

Communication Standard

Application

Cable Type

10/100Mbps (100Base-TX)

Ethernet

Cat 5e, Cat 6,

1000Mbps (Gigabit or 1000Base-T)

Gigabit Ethernet

Cat 5e, Cat 6, Cat 6a,

connection types:

A remote data center can be connected to the existing data center facility in three conncetion mechanisms as follows:

Site-to-Site VPN Connection

Since the company's facilities are already connected to the Internet and so is the remote data center. So, one easy way to interconnect these locations to the data center is to setup a site-to-site VPN connection over the Internet. This will be the lowest cost option. All is needed is to set up ad configure the VPN and firewall at the company locations and the data center.

Point-to-Point Connection

The VPN solution may work for many of the dta ceenter needs and is cheapest possible solution, however, it can cause performance issues. So,when performance is a concern, a point-to-point connection (direct link)between the company's facilities and the data center will be the best solution but it is expensive to setup a point to point conection.

Third Party Connection

This solution is another form of the point-to-point connection. The company could use any third party provider services to get a point-to-point connetion between the locations or other type of direct connection between the company locations and the data center.This is a bit cost effective than setting up own point to point connection.

Roles of network admin:

A network administrator is responsible for Installing network and computer systems. Maintaining, repairing and upgrading hardware and software components in the data center. Diagnosing and fixing problems or troubleshooting problems in the network or its hardware.

Name of the client:

EteX Comapany

Office Location:

The head office facility is located in Boston, USA and a Branch office at San Antonio

Nature of business:

E-Commerce based

Business domain:

Education and Publishing

Business Description:

The company sells e-textbooks services to its customers through its website hosted on its own servers

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