Evco Insurance, a multimillion-dollar life insurance firm has hired you as network consultant to help troubleshoot their network at its corporate headquarters in Sydney. While collecting the information from stakeholders, you have approached the network manager of Evco Insurance. He admitted that he has not kept very close tabs on the network's growth over the last year, and he thinks this omission has something to do with the congestion problems. Evco Insurance Marketing Department is experiencing the worst network response, have added 40 people in the last six months to make a total of 146 people. At some times during the day, the marketing director has complained of waiting 10 minutes before one small e-mail message can get across the network. He shows you to the telecommunications closet that serves the troubled network. Inside, you find a stack of eight expensive new switching hubs, blinking away.
While you are in the telecommunications closet at Evco Insurance, you have noticed that one hub has two ports whose collision lights are blinking almost constantly. Being a conscientious network professional, you quickly point out this problem to the network manager.
You have also found the closet is full of new equipments, but they are not installed correctly. You saw that too many heavily used workstations connected to one hub. All the hubs are daisy-chained together rather than being directly connected to backbone switch. Your IT manager has informed you that the technician who has installed the hub without optimizing their features. You have also found that switching hubs are not been configured to separate the segment into several distinct segment.
Evco's network is client server network architecture with Windows 2003 Server and Windows XP professional in all workstations. Evco currently has 146 users in marketing department, 24 users in finance department, 50 users in insurance claims and 30 users in customer service department. Total hosts at Evco are 250 currently; however they are expecting to grow 20% every year.
You must complete all 4 parts of this project to be competent in the unit.
Part 2: Analyse the problem to be solved
In this part of the project you are required to analyse the problem to be solved for Evco Insurance's network. You must analyse the entire problems that you have identified in part 1 of this project. You need to accomplish the followings tasks.
a) You need to collect all data relevant to the system as well as signs and symptoms of the problem. You may need to interview network manager at Evco and other staff members while collecting the data on existing network infrastructure. Your trainer/assessor will act as role of stakeholder from Evco Insurance and will be providing you all necessary information and documentation.
b) Now you are required to organise the collected data to enable an understanding of the status of the current system
c) Analyse the data collected to determine problems at Evco's current system, and the nature of the problems. You must write a report on analysis of the existing system's problems.