Newtwork Design - Where to start?

I am a student and taking an Intro Networking class. I have to design the below problem statement. Where should I start and does anyone have any recommendations?

Design an Ethernet Network for the building shown below. Please note that the building has 6 rooms and a hallway. The building houses highly technical employees with requirements for a very fast LAN. In the Office Area there are about 75 engineers. Each of the four Labs has workstations for 9 engineers. The server room contains three server-class computers running a file server, a web server, and a database server. The server room also has a Router/Firewall which is connected on one interface to the corporate intranet, on a second interface to the Internet and on a third interface to the building LAN. In other words you will need to provide connection to four (4) high-speed machines in the server room. Each lab should be designed for up to 15 pieces of test equipment which must be connected to the LAN (in addition to the 9 workstations) for access from any PC or workstation in the building.

I also have to worry about cost and cable distance within the office, but I can handle that. PLEASE HELP!

Edge

 

Just my two cents, but I would imagine that a good process would be view the network from the ground up (Layer 1, 2 and 3).

Layer 1 - Media/Speed Requirements

How fast? How far? Any special requirements?

Layer 2 - Segmentation/Physical Addressing

How should the network be segmented?
What segments are local to each other?

Layer 3 - Routing/Logical Addressing/Protocol Selection

Static IP requirements and Dynamic IP requirements.
Size of Networks and/or Subnetworks required.
VLAN creation/Router placement for control of Layer 3 info routing.



Hopefully that helps to get started. Below is a rough example of the process:




Draw the Building/Rooms:

I created a simple drawing to specify where the rooms and exit points for the network are located

Find Host Requirements:

Equipment Placement and Connection:

What I did was to just write the number beside each room to identify how many hosts connect in each office. This gives me a good reference point for how much equipment I need to dedicate to each part of the building.

Not sure how they want you to place equipment but I would think it would be a good idea to place all networking equipment in a comm closet on the server room. (Manageability and all that good stuff) LAN drops in each room would connect to a patch panel or such located in the comm closet. The patch panel(s) in turn would connect to the respective switches designated for each room. If you had 24 port switches that would be 8 Total (1 for each of the 3 lab rooms, 4 for the office and 1 for the server room)

You could also use all of those free ports on the server switch to connect the other 7 switches together This connection would also help to promote a hearchial topology which is good for information flow (keeps devices passing frames at the lowest required layer)

Lastly the server switch would also have a connection to the router's fastethernet interface to get everyone on the LAN access to the outside world and such. The router could have two serial connections, one to the corporate internet and one to the Internet.

Then you could figure up the IP requirements for all hosts, VLAN configurations, yadda yadda so on so forth.


Good luck!