ElectroMyCycle Logical Network Topology

ElectroMyCycle Network Topology Solution Submitted By Srinivasa Kanchinatham Submitted To Professor Dr. Abdel Ismail, PhD MIS CIS 532: Network Architecture and Analysis August 28th, 2012

Problem: ElectroMyCycle is a manufacturer of new electric motorcycles. ElectroMycycle has chosen you to design a new network that will let the company scale to larger scale. The campus network will support about 200 employees and a new data center. Another feature of the campus network will be a state of art manufacturing facility with networked equipment that communicates with servers in the data center that support real-time control and management. Engineers will access the servers from their PCs in the access layer of the campus network. ElectroMyCycle will sell its new motorcycle both online and through a large retail company. For online sales, ElectroMyCycle plans to have a DMZ that connects a public web server, a DNS server, and an email server. The web server needs to communicate with back-end servers in the data center that hold customer billing data. ElectroMyCycle also plans to open a branch sales office in the city where the retail company's corporate headquarters reside, about 500 miles from ElectroMyCycle's headquarters. Design and draw a logical topology that will support ElectroMyCycle's needs. In addition to meeting the specified needs, be sure to consider security. Logical Network topology: The logical topology of the network is shown in the form of three diagrams. First figure shows how the LAN and DMZ are connected to the internet. The second figure shows the three layers (core, distribution and access) of ElectroMyCycle Company’s LAN (SemSim.com, 2012). The

third figure throws light on the T-1 link present between ElectroMyCycle Company’s headquarters and their branch sales office (500 miles away from the HQ).

Figure-1: Diagram showing how the LAN, DMZ are connected to the internet. It can be seen that the DMZ is separated from the LAN which contains the workstations, Manufacturing facility and the data center. However, a link (shown in brown) has been provided from the Webserver (DMZ) to the data center (LAN). This is present because the data backup of webserver is present on the data center servers.

Figure-2: Diagram showing the three layers of ElectroMyCycle Company’s LAN. In this figure, it is clear that the LAN of ElectroMyCycle Company has been logically divided into three layers – core distribution and access (SemSim.com, 2012). Core layer contains the router that connects the LAN to ISP and DMZ and the switch via which the connection gets distributed in the LAN. The PCs shown in the figure shows the facility where in 200 employees will be accommodated (including the engineers).

Figure-3: This shows how a connection is made between the Headquarters and the branch sales office. As shown in the diagram, either a T-1 link can be used (howstuffworks, 2012) or a Metro Ethernet virtual link can be used to connect both the facilities. 1. Explain why you think your design meets the needs of ElectroMyCycle. The network design as demonstrated by the logical topology of previous section makes sure that following company needs are satisfied: 

The network has a support for the 200 employees of the company (through its access layer switches and PCs). Also, the data center has been included in the access layer, to

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ensure its connectivity to the LAN. Manufacturing facility and the Data center are connected via a router. Therefore, manufacturing equipments can be successfully controlled and managed via

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communication with data center servers. As a web server has been setup at the DMZ, online sales have become possible. Therefore, company’s requirement of being able to sell online has been fulfilled.

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A DMZ containing web server, mail server and a DNS server has been created. As it can be seen, the DMZ is separated from the LAN through a router that connects to the ISP too

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(techrepublic, 2005). A firewall has been setup to provide a secure network (Tyson, 2012). Also, distribution level routers make sure that other security features like VLANs (Varadarajan, 1997); port

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security etc can be configured. A metro Ethernet segment can be set-up between the DMZ router and the remote branch sales office. This provides connectivity to the data center and thus, employees can have access to company’s operational data which will be needed for the smooth running of the sales office.

2. List the major user communities for your design Major user communities: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6)

Engineers Network Administrators Other employees Online customers Internal email users Data center admins

NOTE: It is not compulsory that a single user cannot fall in more than one user community. 3. List the major data stores and the user communities for each data store Following are the major data stores with its users’ description: 1) Data center servers: The data here will be used by customers (via web application), network admins, data center admins, engineers, etc. 2) Email server: This will contain a database that will support the internal email system of the company. All the employees will be its users.

3) DNS server: it will have a mapping of the domain names and the network addresses. It will again be used by the employees of the company. 4) Routers: The routers will contain the routing table and thus a picture of the entire network topology will be present on them. This data will be used by all the stakeholders involuntarily. 4. Identify major network traffic flows in your network topology drawing The network Topology of ElectroMycycle has been drawn above. It is pretty evident that the data center is the major storage of all kinds of data, be it for the web server, or for the manufacturing facility equipments. Apart from the data center access, another major activity that will happen on the network is the web server access. Also, workstations of 200 employees will run applications that will create some network traffic. Therefore, listed below are the major network traffic flows: 1) The internet will send in a lot of traffic to the DMZ (webserver). As the company plans to have an online medium of sale too, a lot of customers are expected to access the web servers and order their units. 2) The employees and engineers will run applications like the email client, company’s website, and other internal applications with data storage in the data center. Therefore, another major traffic flow will exist between Workstations (PCs) and DMZ (Email server, Webserver and even DNS server) and also between Workstations and the data center. 3) Manufacturing facility has networked equipments that communicate with data servers. Therefore, a lot of traffic flow is expected between data center and the manufacturing facility. 4) The webserver has its data backup o the servers at the data center, therefore DMZ (webserver) and the data center will also have a lot of traffic amongst them.

5. How does your design provide security for ElectroMyCycle's network? As it can be seen in the network topology, security has been implemented at various stages. First and foremost, a firewall is present which separates the DMZ and the LAN from the internet. This helps in filtering malicious and unnecessary network traffic (Tyson, 2012). Then comes the VLAN support. As it can be seen that distribution layer router is present that connects all the switches of the workstations (where the PCs are present). This distribution router ensures that the different PCs can be separated in the form of Virtual LANs. VLAN is a way to create a logical separation for different departments, user communities etc. It helps in preventing unauthorized access and helps in departmental information security. The switches present at the access layer can help in providing port level security. The ports can be configured to provide a security circle that protects the network from unauthorized access cases. Security breaches are also easier to track and manage. It is because of the layered topology where in core, distribution and access layers are separated in the network. Layered network segments help in easy organization and maintenance. 6. What questions will you ask ElectroMyCycle about this project as you do your work? Details pertaining to following questions can be asked while working on the project: 1) What are the different VLANs that need to be configured on the network of ElectroMotorcycle.

2) Are there any particular sites that you would like to block? Or what sort of traffic do you want to allow from the internet. 3) What are the different accesses that you would like to implement? All users might not be intended t allow access to all kinds of data. Which data community should be given access to what data?

References: howstuffworks. (2012). How does a T1 line work? Retrieved from computer.howstuffworks.com: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question372.htm SemSim.com. (2012). The Cisco Three-Layered Hierarchical Model. Retrieved from http://www.mcmcse.com/cisco/guides/hierarchical_model.shtml techrepublic. (2005). SolutionBase: Strengthen network defenses by using a DMZ. Retrieved from http://www.techrepublic.com/article/solutionbase-strengthen-network-defenses-by-using-admz/5756029 Tyson, J. (2012). How Firewalls Work. Retrieved from http://www.howstuffworks.com/firewall.htm Varadarajan, S. (1997). Virtual Local Area Networks. Retrieved from http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jain/cis788-97/ftp/virtual_lans/index.htm