Lan Proposal

Barrett & Barrett Advertising NJ is the newly established satellite office of Barrett & Barrett Advertising CA. Due to their increasing number of East Coast clientele, they have opened a satellite office to accommodate that business. B & B Advertising currently employs 56 people, 5 of which will transfer to the NJ office upon final renovations. Although a small outfit by number, gross sales for fiscal year 1998 exceeded $18,000,000.00. B & B CA's current computer usage is significantly high. Their need for efficient graphic capability requires them to maintain state of the art software and hardware. However B & B has stressed that user friendliness is a higher priority. B & B NJ poses the need for a small-scale local area network, to be tied into its parent company in California. The California office already has a LAN in place and operational. Their principal need for the LAN in NJ will be to transfer ad proposals to the California office and back via electronic mail. As requested by B & B, new equipment will be purchased for the NJ satellite office. In the probable event that B & B's clientele increases, all equipment will be relocated and reused, with minimal loss (i.e. cabling costs). Located on the third floor of 1113 Industry Way, its architecture presented ease for a networking situation. The office space is one floor with the dimensions of the 28 feet in width and 50 feet in length. The suite is divided into four offices (12 feet 6 inches by 15 feet 6 inches), a conference room (15 feet by 10 feet 6 inches), a LAN room (12 feet 6 inches), and a common area. All of these sub-divisions contain drop ceilings 12 feet high, which will create ease of laying network cables, as phone lines have already been laid during renovations. The floor plan attached will ease in understanding dimensions and phone/drop placement. The first step of implementing the network involves running 2 drops to each of the offices and LAN room and 1 to the conference room. The hub will be located in a small room dedicated to LAN equipment. This room was designed in that location for centrality as well as keeping the aesthetics of the suite, which was of particular concern for B & B. The entire suite will be cabled with category 5 twisted pair wire. Wall faceplates to include both drops and a phone jack will be installed in each room. As can be expected, the physical cost to install these 11 drops is minimal, the labor is the majority of this expense:

Office # # of Drops $ Horizontal Run $ Vertical Run $ Total

1 2 29.77 24.64 54.41

2 2 38.23 24.64 62.87

3 2 30.67 24.64 55.31

4 2 38.59 24.64 63.23

LAN Rm. 2 27.43 0.00 27.43

Conf. Rm 1 30.85 24.64 55.49

Labor 11 drops 24 hr $79/hr 1896.00

Total cost of running drops 2182.74

Fast Ethernet was the protocol of choice. The California office currently uses standard Ethernet, but is upgrading to Fast Ethernet and requested we do the same to make employee transition as simple as possible. Fast Ethernet runs at speeds of 100 Mbps. The wiring is a higher quality than the Category 3 normally used by Ethernet, therefore is a bit more expensive, but a worthy advantage. Fast Ethernet defines a star topology. There are many advantages in designing a LAN based on a star topology. It allows expansion to the existing LAN without effort or disruption. Troubleshooting, repair, and maintenance can be accomplished to a failed node without holding up or disrupting work on other nodes. Hardware plays an important role in reliability of a network. Each workstation is to be custom ordered from Dell. Each office will house a Dell computer with the following options: 400 MHz Pentium II Processor 128 MB RAM 10.6GB Hard Drive 3 COM 10/100 Combo Card DVD-ROM 8 MB Video Card 17" Monitor Internal Zip Drive In addition each office will have its own Hewlett Packard LaserJet 4000N due to heavy printing volume. The conference room will house a laptop for presentations. A laptop was chosen for this room because employees to do work at home will utilize it. The Dell

...