Question

Jerry is a relatively new member of a project team that is developing a retail store management system for a chain of sporting goods stores. Company headquarters is in Las Vegas, and the chain has twenty-seven locations throughout Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Several cities have multiple stores. The new system will be a networked client–server architecture. Stores will be linked to one of three regional servers, and the regional servers will be linked to corporate headquarters in Las Vegas. The regional servers also link to one another. Each retail store will be outfitted with similar confi gurations of two PC-based point-of-sale terminals networked to a local file server. Jerry has been given the task of developing a network model that will document the geographic structure of this system. He has not faced a system of this scope before and is a little unsure how to begin.

a. Prepare a set of instructions for Jerry to follow in developing this network model.

Answer 1

Jerry should follow practices listed below:

• Since network is spread over multiple geographic locations, it should be divided into smaller subnets based on departments or work profiles of the employees so that each subnet can be operated and monitored irrespective of another. This will have ease maintenance of the network and easy error detection techniques in case any failure
• The network should follow hierarchical structure like stores can be clubbed into one network based on the state then states would form subnets under country and so on. Here multiple countries can connect to one of the regional servers.
• Regional servers should be replicated and should perform parallelized operations. In case one server has some failure then other servers should be able to fulfill the requirements of the stores and the customers.
• All the regional servers and the servers at headquarters should be places in a dual DMZ zone (demilitarized zone) which is a separate subnet powered with two firewalls, one for internal and another for external traffic monitoring. DMZ ensures network security and enforces security filtering over all the traffic in & out through the network.
• Network should provide centralized access to resources so that only legitimate users can have access to each resource using credentials or any other kind of cryptographic exchange.