1. Determine the investigation you will do with regard to the physical infrastructure of the orchards, orchard shacks, and the cold storage building.
After doing some detailed investigations of the physical infrastructure of the orchards, orchard shacks, and the cold storage building revealed some ideas that we can implement in the network design. The investigation also showed that wireless technology would be the best solution between the three areas. With that being said the orchard area would be the only problem we would need to find out how big the orchard area is so we can install access points so a good signal can all ways be delivered. Determining the distance will also aid in the network design on what cables like fiber optics or RJ cables, as well as the selection of technologies and devices to meet the design goals. The number of buildings should be determined and what equipment they should contain which types of network devices needed for this landscape.
2. Make a list of business goals for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company and determine the constraints that will affect these goals.
Business goals for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company are to provide high quality products to customers. Also to provide immediate and real-time access to inventory data to aid in sales, to do this an upgrade logistics would have to take place which in turn everything would have to go digital, we would not be able to continue with the older mom and pop structure we have been used too. Taking those outdated technologies out and bringing in new computers, routers, servers and security firewalls. Implementation of a new website is needed, adding social media and also enabling online commerce. Some of the constraints that may affect these goals are cost of these new items and plans, trying to stay within budget, hoping for a good return on these investments, also the cost of staffing employees to run said operation.
3. Make a list of technical goals for Harriet’s Fruit and Chocolate Company and determine the tradeoffs you might need to make to meet these goals.
Expanding access to all the new data with all the new technology
Implement better security that may impact usability
Keeping security high but include better usability
Make the network design more adaptable so we can add, adapt or make changes if needed
Provide better application performance at the cost of affecting other applications performance
4. Determine if a wireless solution will support the low delay that will be needed to meet the needs of the applications. Defend your answer.
A wireless solution that will support the low delay of our applications would be to install wireless access points all over the property, we could install them on various security light poles that look over the orchards outside and place them areas were the least amount of interference would take place inside of the buildings.
5. Determine the security concerns you should bring up as you design the network upgrade.
There are several security concerns we have mentioned and would bring up since we have put together this network upgrade. The main concern is the company’s data and other information and having any of that data compromised. We would bring up the physical security of the equipment and how to prevent unauthorized access to the buildings. We also want to address whether a wireless or wired solution is better, even though we are aiming for wireless, since it is cheaper.