Question 1: A large multinational financial institution has hired you to design a complete wired and wireless network for a new six-story regional office. The first two floors will function as retail banking space, while the upper four floors—each roughly 100,000 sq ft (9,290 sqm)—will house corporate office operations. All data centers are off-site and not included in this project. The customer’s existing Layer-2 network is insufficient, and they want the new environment to follow modern best practices, offering full resiliency, fault tolerance, and dynamic edge segmentation. In the retail area, the network must support public guest Wi-Fi, corporate tablets used by associates, and a mix of wired/wireless devices. Corporate staff will mainly use wireless, but there will still be several wired endpoints including printers, conference room gear, and hard VoIP phones. The company also plans to adopt smart-office technologies—such as blue-dot navigation, presence analytics, and location-based services—during the renovation of the upper floors. The client has now specified that all exposed ports serving printers, meeting rooms, and VoIP phones must be protected by a stateful firewall. What design consideration or planning step can ensure that these network ports remain compliant with the customer's security and firewall requirements?

Question 2: A global cruise line is beginning a full technology refresh across its fleet, starting with its smallest vessel, which hosts up to 800 guests. Their goal is to modernize the ship’s internal infrastructure in a cost-efficient, sustainable way. As part of this project, they will completely replace all LAN and WLAN hardware, while keeping their existing security policies unchanged for now. The CIO also wants to minimize unused switch ports, with the understanding that any future expansion will involve a full hardware refresh. Each ship’s wired network consists of two core switches in the MDF, as many as ten redundant distribution switches in the IDFs, and up to 500 access switches—one in every cabin (400) and technical room (100). The cabling will not be replaced. MDF-to-IDF links use OS1 single-mode fiber (two pairs available), less than 300 meters long. Cabins and technical rooms connect to their IDFs using OM2 multimode fiber, up to 60 m for cabins and 100–150 m for technical rooms. For these cabin and technical spaces, the customer wants to replace their existing fanless 2530/2540 switches. Requirements remain the same except that uplinks to the distribution layer must be upgraded to 10 GbE to support higher traffic, and technical-room switches must support redundant power. The WLAN will be replaced on a 1:1 basis with the same AP locations and cabling, continuing to use existing Aruba 200/300 series InstantOS APs (fewer than 300 APs) since the WLAN requirements will not change. The cruise line will also upgrade its ship-to-shore Internet link before refreshing LAN/WLAN hardware. The new connection offers 99.8% uptime, ensuring reliable paid guest Wi-Fi. Given this reliability improvement, the CIO wants the shipboard network to adopt Aruba’s ESP architecture. About a week after your initial design review, the CIO calls back. Following a cyber-attack on a competitor’s vessel, the cruise line’s CSO has now mandated stronger wired-network security. They are interested in dynamic segmentation as well as options for both central and distributed overlay networks. Their POS systems require very low-latency connectivity to the onboard PCS server, and the CSO also wants to enhance WLAN security by tunneling all user traffic. Which solution would best satisfy all of these updated requirements?

Question 3: A customer asks when it would make sense to build a 2-tier campus LAN design rather than a traditional 3-tier model. In what scenario would a 2-tier architecture be the better choice?

Question 4: A large multinational financial institution has asked you to design a complete wired and wireless network for its new six-story regional office. The first two floors will function as retail banking space, while the upper four floors will house corporate office operations—each level roughly 100,000 sq ft (9,290 sqm). All data centers are off-site, so they are not part of this project. The current Layer-2 infrastructure no longer meets the organization’s needs, and they want the new design to follow modern best practices, offering full resiliency, fault-tolerance, and dynamic segmentation at the network edge. In the retail area, the environment must support public guest Wi-Fi, corporate tablets, and a mix of wired and wireless endpoints. In the office spaces above, employees will primarily rely on wireless access, but there will still be wired devices such as printers and VoIP phones. The company also plans to implement smart-office capabilities—including blue-dot navigation, presence analytics, and other location-based services. To control cost, the client wants to use Aruba OS-CX switches in their wiring closets. Their calculations show that each closet requires a stack of six PoE (802.3at) Gigabit Ethernet switches, using low-cost optics. Given these requirements, which Aruba switch series should you recommend?

Question 5: A global cruise line is beginning a full network refresh across its fleet, starting with its smallest ship, which carries up to 800 passengers. As part of the modernization effort, they want to replace all LAN and WLAN hardware while keeping their existing security standards unchanged. The CIO also wants to limit unused switch ports, since any future growth will involve replacing hardware rather than adding capacity. Each ship’s network includes two core switches in the MDF, up to ten redundant distribution switches in the IDFs, and as many as 500 access switches—one per cabin (400 total) and one per technical room (100 total). The cabling will remain as-is: OS1 single-mode fiber links between MDF and IDFs (less than 300 m), and OM2 multimode fiber to each cabin and technical room (60 m for cabins, 100–150 m for technical rooms). For each cabin and technical room, the customer wants to replace their existing fanless 2530/2540 switches. The functional requirements remain unchanged, except that uplinks to the distribution switches must now support 10 GbE to handle growing traffic. Technical rooms also require redundant power. The WLAN environment will be refreshed like-for-like—same cabling, same AP locations, and the existing Aruba 200/300 series InstantOS APs (fewer than 300). Before starting the LAN/WLAN refresh, the ship will upgrade to a new Internet connection offering 99.8% uptime. This level of reliability supports their paid guest Wi-Fi service, and—according to the CIO—makes Aruba’s ESP architecture an appropriate foundation for the redesigned network. Based on best practices and the need for a cost-effective solution, which switch model should be recommended for deployment in the cabins?