“You Decide” Charter School Scenario
Situation Analysis
This proposal is for an evaluation of the current network at Leonard Cooper Charter School, as well as a list of recommendations to address concerns raised by system technicians and end-users. Leonard Cooper Charter has roughly 1,000 students and faculty, all needing a smooth connection to the school LAN. A new addition was added to the building a few years ago, and has resulted in numerous IT problems for the school. Overall, stakeholders have indicated general dissatisfaction regarding network speed and reliability. Key areas of concern or desired revision that were noted include a large number of printers without an efficient or reliable networking management system; severe bottlenecking during high-traffic times; effective means of managing equipment through the web using the LAN connection with the possibility of wireless management as well; connect 23 additional classrooms to the LAN, and improve LAN connection and network speed school-wide; revise the cable infrastructure to connect the new and old backbone networking via a high-speed connection.
Proposed Solution
Before any other issues are addressed, the problems with network speed, connectivity and reliability should be addressed. The recommended solution is an upgrade to Category 6 UTP 1000Base –T Ethernet cabling. The built-in Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection will assist with the collisions currently resulting in the bottlenecks by assigning a random time interval before attempting to resubmit on the network.
Currently, the network bandwidth has a small capacity, at only 10Mb. By upgrading to Fiber 1000Based-F Ethernet cabling, the capacity can be increased to 100Gb/sec. This will resolve the bottlenecking that occurs during the high-traffic morning hours when teachers are submitting attendance and checking their e-mails. A slow connection to the e-mail server was also reported, which would be remedied by...