U3O1 - Practice Outcome
XYZ Engineering is a small equipment manufacturing company who manufacture and sell metalwork machines to the trade. Machines include things like large metal lathes. They differentiate themselves from many of their competitors by custom designing and building equipment to meet particular customer needs.
They have about 50 staff, all located at the same premises. Staff involved in equipment design or in administration are situated in a general office environment. Other staff work in the factory area where all of the manufacturing takes place.
Staff are organised into a number of different departments. Firstly, there is a design team of about 10 staff who use CAD (Computer assisted design) software to design and document equipment for customers. Secondly, there is a manufacturing team of about 20 staff who make machines to match the design specifications. Thirdly, there is an administration team who look after marketing, customer orders and billing, accounts payable and staff payroll.
The management structure consists of a CEO, and managers of the design, manufacturing and administration teams. There are also a number of supervisors within each of the teams.
XYZ rely heavily on the use of networked computer technology to manage their operations. All software is stored on a dedicated applications server, whereas all data is stored on a dedicated data/database server. They have a standard operating environment, operating UNIX servers, and LINUX on all their workstations.
The design team share a fast, high quality laser printer that can handle A3 format. They primarily use AUTOCAD software to do all their design work and keep all their current and past designs on the data server. Because of the graphical nature of this work, many of these files are very large, ranging from 20 to 100MB in size. Each of the design staff uses an up to date high performance work station. Despite this, the design team frequently complains about poor network performance.
Administration staff use MYOB (Mind your own business) to manage payroll, customer orders, and accounts payable and use Pentium 3 workstations.
The manufacturing team also have access to about 5 Pentium III PC’s in their area to view design specifications and customer orders. They complain about the unreliability of their network connection.
All PC’s have StarOffice installed for word processing, spreadsheet and email purposes, as well as Norton’s antivirus software and have a 100Mbps connection to the network.
Only the design staff and managers have access to the Internet via 1.5Mbps ADSL connection with a well established broadband supplier. They have installed a “Watchguard” firewall and use a D-Link router for their external connection.
The manufacturing area and office areas connect to separate switches and are in turn connected via a backbone switch. The two servers connect directly to the backbone switch via a 100Mbps connection. Network wiring is entirely based on CAT6 UTP.
1. Visually represent the networked information system, showing hardware (workstations, hubs, cables, servers, and all peripherals) and the groups in the company using the system.
2. Briefly state the role of each group in XYZ and for each group give 2 examples of:
a. data coming into the work group
b. information created by the work group and who requires it
3. Identify the network topology used, and indicate the information provided in the scenario to support this. Discuss briefly how appropriate this topology is for their needs.
4. The design team and manufacturing team are not satisfied with the current network. Identify some possible causes for the problems they have highlighted.
5. The business is clearly very dependent on high reliability of the servers and the network in general but does not elaborate on how this is achieved. Briefly list some measures they could take to achieve high reliability.
6. Identify the areas of security which XYZ appears to have addressed in its current network. Identify 2 other aspects of security that you may want to investigate further.
7. The scenario says nothing about the network backup strategy. State 2 questions that you would ask to find out about their backup strategy.