Question

You have been hired to upgrade a network of 200 computers and four servers on a single LAN are connected by several Hubs. This long-overdue upgrade is necessary because of poor network response time caused by a lot of collisions occurring during long file transfers between clients and servers. How do you recommend upgrading this network? What interconnecting devices will you use, and what benefit will you get from using these devices? Write a short memo describing the upgrade and, include a drawing of the new network design.

Answer 1

You should to use a router as your main network and switches for expanding the range of your network. As there are 200 computers and 4 servers, you can go with a router and nine 24-port network switches. You can connect the 4 servers to the router directly and rest of the computers to the switches. You can opt for a wired or a wireless connection between the router and the switches. Preferably wired connection using ethernet cable would be a better option. But if you want to go with wireless connection the router has to be placed in the center as the switches should get strong signals.

The benefit of using a router is that it can provide connection to any kind of netwrok architecture. If there is huge traffic then the router reduces it by creating a collision domain and a broadcast domain. Routers are very easily configurable.

The benefits of using switches is that it drastically increases the bandwidth of a network. When there are a lot of devices connected, switches help in reducing the load from a single point which the improves the performance of the network. It creates collision domain for each connection because of which collision will be less. One of the main advantage of switch is that the systems are not interdependent so even if a single device stops working, it will not effect the other systems.