Bead Bar Network Paper

This essay will outline my recommendations for the development of a high-level computer network design for the Bead Bar. Meredith S. founded the Bead Bar in 1998 by opening the first one in New Canaan, Connecticut. The Bead Bar is a company that let's customers create their own bead jewelry. The customers sit at a bar to create their own jewelry with the materials of bead wire and string provided to them. The Bead Bar has three divisions which consist of studios, franchises and Bead Bar on Board. The Studio division keeps track of its six bead bar studios. There are two studios in New York City, one on Long Island, one in Washington D.C., and one in Boston, Massachusetts. The franchise division sells a bead package to any business that want to open their own bead bar studio. They also fulfill franchisees' supply requirements. There are five franchises, Kansas City, Missouri; Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; Seattle, Washington; and Miami, Florida. The Bead Bar on Board is a bead bar designed for cruise ships. The bar is portable and can be placed anywhere on the ship. The Bead Bar has 15 full time and employees and 20 part time employees. President and Owner: Meredith S.; Vice President of Studios: Suzanne S.; Vice President of Franchises: Leda H.; Vice President of Bead Bar on Board: Mitch H.; Chief Financial Officer: Julia R.; Vice President of Marketing and Sales: Miriam M.; Vice President of Operations and Purchasing: Rachel S.; Director of Human Resources: Jim R.

Although the Bead Bar has grown, they continue to use paper based forms. Paper based forms have showed them many problems in the past including orders being lost, incorrect invoicing and fulfillment delays. With the expansion of the Bead Bar, having a high-level network design is a necessity for the success of the company. The design of the network is going to be carefully planned taking into consideration the needs of management, employees and overall needs of the company.

Background

Currently the Bead Bar is still using paper based forms. With the growth of the company, the Bead Bar has opted to bring in consultants to assist in referring database management systems, computers, hardware and software that may be needed. The recommendations they received were they should purchase 14 personal computers. This would be 1 for each of the company owned studios, one for each senior manager except Miriam and one extra. Since the companies employees will not be typing for long periods of time they decided on standard keyboards instead of split keyboards. All of the studio computers will come with a 17" LCD monitor so as to save space. In order to save money, the manager's computers and the extra computer will come with a 17" CRT monitor. Fourteen of the computers will come equipped with 2.8 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive and a CD-RW drive. Another recommendation was for ink jet printers for all of the computers as well as a zip drive to share and back up data.

Recommendation Overview

Since the company has many locations they will need a distributed database. It is recommended the Bead Bar uses Oracles 9i Database. Oracle 9i is an enterprise database with the ability to handle data distribution. Since the Bead Bar has locations all across the United States they are going to require a wireless system. This way the Bead Bar can keep in touch easily and virtually eliminate the expense of wires, including having a wireless network in their home office. A wireless network will also be beneficial to the people that work outside of the office on a regular basis. Suzanne, VP of Studios feels that it is important that all of the studios are connected to headquarters as well as to each other. For this reason I am going to recommend that the Bead Bar uses a partial mesh network.

Network Topology

The partial mesh network will work best for the Bead Bar because with a partial mesh some of the nodes are connected to all the others, but some