Brainstorming to Collect Data in Designing the Corporate Computer Network
By Ki Grinsing
Suppose that you are appointed to lead a project of a computer network design in your
organization that contains many sites that need to be integrated into a single corporate private
network, what are you going to do? As a team leader, a time-frame project as general needs
to be developed first that includes the brainstorming to collect data as much as possible,
the blueprint project, budget forecasting, liaising with the third parties and so on.
It's quite difficult to start a project properly without knowing exactly what the strengths
and weaknesses of supporting infrastructure which the system will base on. It is therefore,
a computer network design should start by brainstorming to collect data as much as possible.
Assume this computer network design will involve three sites: one main headquarter office
in Sydney, one main office in Jakarta, and one remote site - the gold mine in the middle of
the Borneo jungle. The principal of the organization would like to have all the sites linked
to a single corporate computer network to allow inter-sites communication including data, voice,
or probably video conference and off course to allow easy communication with the whole world.
Telecommunication Requirements
The first data for your computer network design that needs to be collected is the telecommunication
system requirements. The main question is how to link all of the sites to allow system communication
to happen. The following questions can be used to collect the data for the telecommunication requirements.
1. How to arrange the Telecommunication service in remote site? We understand that both the main
offices in Sydney and Jakarta are located in the area where you can find lots of communication services.
What about the remote site - the site in the middle of the jungle? You should liaise with the third
party company that can provide WAN services technology - probably uses the satellite link communication.
2. Collect the information what kinds of communication will be allowed for remote site
to the Jakarta office: data only, voice, video, or combination of those. This information is
important to help you determine how wide the satellite link bandwidth you need. This will relate
to the budget since satellite link is expensive.
3. What kind of WAN technology to link data between Jakarta and Sydney, frame relay, ISDN network,
VPN connection? Liaising with the third party - the telecommunication company will help.
You need to dig and find more data that specific to the project. Telecommunication requirements
should be sorted out first before you can proceed to collect other infrastructure requirements in this case.
Network Infrastructure Requirements
Second requirement for your computer network design is to collect data regarding the
network infrastructure requirements. All related data for both logical and physical infrastructure
requirements must be collected as much as possible. The following questions can be used to
collect the data.
1. How many hosts will be in each site including workstations, servers, switches, routers,
wireless access points, and VoIP. This will help in calculating and designing the IP address equirements.
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