The intent of this series is to carry you through an entire network design. By creating a scenario and documenting the process of designing a network for the fictitious company, my hope is to share some knowledge in the process.

Let’s get started:

An insurance company in TN named qwikPolicy has decided to open their doors for business and has secured the services to design a network for their business. They have provided a business plan that includes where and how the business will be operated.

Below are key points of information needed for designing the network.

• qwikPolicy will operate in all 95 counties in Tennessee, with a physical office located in each county.
• Three of the county offices will function as a claims center with one in east, middle, and west Tennessee.
• Each county office will average 5 employees, except for the offices that also have a claims center.
• The claims center offices will have an average of 30 employees each and another 10 employees each serving as claims agents, who will all work out of home based offices.
• The company will provide services via the internet for consumers to create quotes, report claims, and to communicate with insurance agents.
• The Engineer is responsible for designing all networking and phone needs.
• Data Center space will be allocated in Nashville and Knoxville
• The I.T. Infrastructure budget has been pre-allocated and is set at $1,000,000.00

The internal services needed for day to day operations are:

• File and Print Services.  Centralized shared directories are needed for different working groups and each person will have a home directory that will provide storage space for automated user profile backups.
• The main suite of insurance applications are web based and will be accessed internally using a browser.
• Email will be provided using a standard email client
• Internet access from each workstation

In the next article we will start laying out the WAN and the two data center areas.