Capstone: Meridian Architects — Requirements Brief
Read this as you would a real client brief on your first day. It says what the business does, what it owns and what it will not accept. It deliberately does not say how to build the network — no topology, no addressing, no configuration. That is your work, and it is what the capstone marks. Work the deliverables in section 9 in order, using the Capstone Design Template, Verification Checklist and Final Dossier Template.
1. The client
Meridian Architects is a 25-person architecture studio on two floors of an older office building. They design schools, clinics and housing, and their product is files: CAD drawings, 3D models, renders. One project folder can run to tens of gigabytes, and a designer opens and saves a large drawing from shared storage many times a day.
The network matters more here than in a typical office: the drawings live on shared storage, so when it is slow the studio is slow, and when it is down the studio stops. Meridian have never had a designed network — unmanaged switches, one flat address range, visitors on the finance team's Wi-Fi.
2. The building
- Ground floor — reception, two meeting rooms, business/admin, the comms cabinet (patch panel, space for the router and one switch), front-entrance camera.
- First floor — open-plan design studio with wired desks, a storage room used as a server point, rear service-door camera.
One riser cable joins the two cabinets; cabling and patch panels are reused.
3. Device inventory
| # | Item | Qty | Connection | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Design workstations | 12 | Wired | Large CAD reads/writes to storage all day |
| 2 | Business/admin laptops | 6 | Wired dock + Wi-Fi | Contracts, invoices, payroll |
| 3 | Reception laptop | 1 | Wired | Front desk, visitors |
| 4 | Wireless displays | 2 | Wi-Fi | One per meeting room |
| 5 | Multifunction printer | 1 | Wired | Shared print/scan |
| 6 | NAS (network storage) | 1 | Wired | Live and archived project files |
| 7 | Small server | 1 | Wired | Address assignment, name resolution, files |
| 8 | IP cameras | 2 | Wired, powered over the cable | Front entrance, rear door |
| 9 | Visitor devices | Varies | Wi-Fi | Clients and contractors, several at once |
Three staff work from home two days a week and need their usual access to files.
4. What you have been given
- Address space: the site is allocated
10.42.0.0/22; everything fits inside it. - Required segments: VLAN 10 Design, VLAN 20 Business, VLAN 30 Servers, VLAN 40 Guest, VLAN 50 Cameras. Use these IDs exactly.
Why the client wants each one:
- Design — the heaviest traffic in the building; it should not slow others, and others should not slow it.
- Business — contracts, invoices and client records, separable for privacy.
- Servers — shared resources in one protected place, controlled and backed up once rather than five times.
- Guest — visitors get internet without joining the studio.
- Cameras — footage is sensitive and cheap cameras are rarely patched.
5. Two rules that are not negotiable
- Guest traffic must not reach any internal segment — not the server, storage, printer, cameras or a colleague's laptop. Internet only.
- The cameras must not reach the internet, in either direction.
If your build cannot show both under test, it fails, however elegant it is.
6. Internet service
A single fibre service with one public IP address, terminated by the provider's box in the ground-floor cabinet. Staff, guests and the three remote workers all share that one connection and address.
7. Budget
Real and small. You may specify one router/firewall, one managed switch per floor, two wireless access points, and the existing cabling and cabinets. Anything else needs a written justification naming the business consequence of going without it — "it would be nicer" is not one.
8. Where the studio is going
The partners expect to hire eight more designers within two years, all on wired desks. Your design must absorb them without renumbering or re-cabling.
9. What we expect from you
| # | Deliverable | What it proves |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Design document | You turned business needs into decisions, with reasons |
| 2 | Working simulation | The design functions when built |
| 3 | Verification evidence | You tested every requirement instead of assuming |
| 4 | Fault reports | You can diagnose methodically and write it up |
| 5 | Security review | The hard rules hold, and you know where it is weak |
| 6 | Final dossier | Another engineer could take over from the paperwork |
Every stage is graded on evidence, not confidence: a claim no output supports is worth nothing, and an unexplained screenshot little more.
Network Essentials · Capstone · Turning Point Academy — backbone: Al-Doori, Network Essentials, Ch. 1-15.