IT Goverment

Personal Assignment 1

Session 2

Mr. Bob is an IT director at Trust Oil and Gas, a medium-sized petrochemical company based in Houston. It also has operations in the Gulf of Mexico and in South America. Mr. Bob is in charge of the network infrastructure, including routers and switches. His group includes personnel who can install and configure Cisco routers and switches.

The Trust Oil and Gas CIO wants to begin migrating from the voice network to an Unified Communications (UC) solution to reduce circuit and management costs. Existing data WAN circuits have 50 percent utilization or less but spike up to 80 percent when sporadic FTP transfers occur.

Mr. Bob hands you the diagram shown in Figure 1. The exiting data network includes 35 sites with approximately 30 people at each site. The network is Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) WAN, with approximately 200 people at the headquarters. The WAN links range from 384-kbps circuits to T1 speeds. Remote-site applications include statisti- cal files and graphical-site diagrams that are transferred using FTP from remote sites to the headquarters.

Figure 1. Trust Oil and Gas Current Network

Mr. Bob wants a UC solution that manages the servers at headquarters but still provides redundancy or failover at the remote site. He mentions that he is concerned that the FTP traffic might impact the VoIP traffic. He wants to choose a site to implement a test before implementing UC at all sites.

The following questions/directives refer to this case study:

1. What are the business requirements for Trust Oil and Gas?
2. Are there any business-cost constraints?
3. What are the network’s technical requirements?
4. What are the network’s technical constraints?
5. Approximately how many IP phones should the network support?
6. What type of UC architecture should you propose?
7. What quality of service (QoS) features would you propose for the WAN?
8. What PoE recommendations would you make?
9. Would you propose a prototype or a pilot?
10. What solution do you suggest for voice redundancy at the remote sites?
11. Diagram the proposed solution.