Kudlers Fine Foods Network

Kudler Fine Foods has provided high-quality specialty foods to the San Diego, California are since 1998. The company, which is run by Kathy Kudler, has since seen three stores open in the same region. The current network at each location has been upgraded to provide the company with communication and financial support. However, Kudler Fine Foods plans to branch out with more stores opening in the near future. With this plan, the network will need an upgrade. A new network will provide the company with new technological support to stay competitive, and continue to provide its current cliental as well as it future customers the service and products they have come to expect. Therefore, a plan for upgrading the network to the new faster and more dependable network will need to take place. Upgrading the network for each store is inevitable. However, the network must provide room for future growth as the company plans to expand to other regions across the U.S.

After examining the network attributes of Kudler Fine Foods, a few changes may need to take place to ensure that the company can keep up with its competition, and make way for future growth. The network currently uses a T3 dedicated OC 1 SONET to connect each of the three stores that are currently operating. However, there a plans to open future stores in Carlsbad, California, Scottsdale, Arizona; Naples, Florida; and Greenwich, Connecticut.

Each store currently in service has some of the same type of network topology such as, using a bus network topology, and using the same server types, computers, operating systems, and POS (point of sale) terminals. Using a bus topology at each store may limit the communications between the stores, and there seems to be no central location for data collection. Therefore, all of the data collected throughout the day would have to be sent to the home office as a large packet.

The La Jolla store, which is also the home office, is built using a 100baseT Ethernet. The company’s main server is an IBM blade server system c3000. The server uses the UNIX operating system, and is also used to run the corporate SAP ERP SW, all of the print and file services, the network services, email, storage control, and the web. The server is backed up by a 10 terabyte NAS (network attached storage) device by a fiber link. The server room uses an APC Smart-UPS 5000 VA 208V to deliver backup power for the backbone computer system. Each POS (Point Of Sell) computers are complete NCR RealPOS 82XRT terminals. These come complete with scanners, cash drawers, touch screen and printers. The store has a total of 19 Dell Vostro computers that run Windows 7 OS, and the standard IEEE 802.11n, which uses a CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance) method. The store also houses 19 VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phones. Communications in and out of the store are provided by 2 Cisco routers and firewalls. One router