Enterprise Network Design

Note: This case study is entirely fictional and created for the purpose of putting theorical fundamentals into practice.

Project Overview: The Great Canadian Widget Company (GCWC) is the top manufacturer and distributor of widgets in the country. They have a Head Office in Toronto with Primary Manufacturing and Distribution facilities in addition to company-wide Executive and Engineering resources.

The company is retiring the old, full mesh Frame Relay network and building new network infrastructure to run over the Internet using SD-WAN technology and cloud. The company will keep its existing high speed Private Line that connects Toronto Data Center to the backup / mirror data centre in Markham, Ontario. You are to design the network layout prior to acquiring any new ISP services, facilities, equipment or software.

Features:

1. Vendor-neutral design.
2. Modern, modular and scalable.
3. Proper documentation for proper management.

Objectives:

1. Hierarchical Design Priorities:

• Using the minimum number of redundant paths to provide resiliency without full mesh connections. The company does not require full redundancy to Branches, but does between regions and to HO.

2. Provide relevant protocols to its design:

• Recommend the routing protocols you feel are necessary to support the design.

3. Designate Private Cloud Services

• Creating a Private Cloud infrastructure for the Sales applications as noted. We will be hosting the services at the company Data Centers. Both the CIO and the Regional Sales Directors must sign off on transferring access to these critical functions from the WAN connections to the Web for the change management form.

4. Designate Management Method for the Infrastructure

• Creating an isolated internal Private Cloud service for management. This may become a remote backup facility and potential future uses of this Cloud should be kept separate from the rest of the production systems.

5. Practical Documentation

• Create a simple document regarding the management for the IT staff showing a high-level overview of the design. It must logically walk through the plan from module to site to whole company and include the important aspects such as redundant links, modularity for simple expansion and proof of your design.

Outcome

For the “Hub” site of our SD WAN infrastructure, the Toronto Head and Regional office will serve as the centralized point of connection for our many tools and services across all sites. With our dedicated data center at the site, an enhancement for our system was to give our data centers a private cloud configuration to enable scalability, elasticity, and immediate response to higher business demands, coming as a solid solution for our infrastructure.