case study

Part One: Sunshine Village’s New Network

This exam case study was developed from articles found in the online edition of the Globe and Mail, material from POMA engineering websites, IT Business.ca, a whitepaper from Hewlett-‐Packard, as well as the Sunshine Village website. All materials are © copyright of their respective owners and are reproduced under fair use provisions for education in Canada.

Near Banff, Alberta you will find Sunshine Village ski resort. It has 3,358 acres of skiable terrain spanning three mountains and two provinces! Sunshine has 26 buildings, the 84-‐room Sunshine Inn hotel, staff lodgings, and an array of food, beverage and retail outlets to meet the needs of up to 8,500 visitors a day. A Calgary call centre and a ticket office in Banff are also part of the operation. The resort also has 107 named ski runs and is serviced by 9 chairlifts and a high-‐speed 8-‐passenger gondola. “We’re essentially a small city,” noted Jon Chestnut, Director of Information Technology, Sunshine Village Ski & Snowboard Resort. “We needed a technology infrastructure that could support and boost the performance of our diverse operations, which serve a half million skiers and tourists each year.

Everything we do in IT is designed to maximize the guests’ ski time,” says Chestnut.

Over the past five years, Sunshine has spent around $400,000 on a new fibre-‐optic cable IP based network, which has saved the operation about $100,000 a year. It has allowed staff at the ski and snowboard resort to cut waiting times for everything from tickets to food orders. But it has also had one other important spin-‐off benefit – lightning strikes no longer regularly fry the resort’s telephone switching stations. Combining mountains with steel lifts and cabling is a potent mix – one that creates a giant magnet for lightning strikes. “We have analogue phones at the top of lifts,” Chestnut says. “They were connected by copper wire to switching stations. Every time there was a lightning strike, the lightning traveled along the copper wires to the switching station, which often burst into flames.” Glass fibre does not conduct electricity, which means no more exploding switching stations. Because of the flexibility of IP, communications are more stable than before. If a cable is knocked out by high winds, a virtual mesh re-‐establishes a connection to another functional link.

The vast new network includes voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) capabilities that have eliminated long-‐distance phone bills between the Calgary call centre and the mountain property. The hotel also makes a profit from the fee it charges guests for long-‐distance calls since it no longer has any costs for using the IP network. The network has also greatly increased the speed with which food and drink purchases and lift passes are processed. This type of performance increase is invaluable when operating more than 120 credit card terminals, which can now process upwards of $700,000 per hour in sales. The processing time used to take seven seconds. That’s now down to one second per transaction thanks to the faster network. All this translates into speedier service and shorter waiting lines for customers, especially when staff are processing large amounts of transactions during peak traffic times. Another example of the cost savings that Sunshine Village has been able to reap was with a single leased-‐line connection to a bank that supported credit card transactions (at $1,800 a month) – a tab that has now dropped to just $10.

The system also supplies the data necessary to operate the resort’s huge new gondola. Resort visitors move from the parking lot to the central village by boarding the 168-‐cabin gondola, which can accommodate eight passengers per cabin. “We had the designer incorporate IP protocols for the gondola controls,” said Chestnut. “I doubt if we could have created the new gondola without them.

The [old] system just couldn’t handle the data demands.” The six-‐kilometre gondola ride from the parking lot at the foot of the mountains to the village is entirely controlled by IP-‐based communications between Sunshine Village and Poma of America (the gondola supplier) in Colorado. Computers – positioned at the base station, mid-‐point and top – combined with data from 1,276 safety switches communicate via IP so operators know exactly where gondola cabins are at any given moment. If a garbage cabin is loaded at the top, for example, the computer can be programmed to kick it off to the garbage chute at the bottom. Meanwhile, Poma monitors the lift remotely from its head office in Colorado, fine-‐tuning it and making changes to the software in real-‐time whenever necessary.

The network powers and facilitates 15 virtual local area networks (VLANs) based on particular applications such as credit cards, lifts, phones, ATMs, hotel, staff time clocks, food/beverage, video surveillance, wireless hot spot and corporate network among others. The voice and data network connects with a T1 line at the edge of the property, which provides the high-‐speed Internet connection that links the resort with both the Calgary call centre and the Banff ticketing office.

To keep its network costs down, the resort installs its own fibre, a job that comes naturally to technicians used to working with huge spools of ski lift cabling. The main pipe from top to bottom currently offers 2 GB of bandwidth, but Chestnut maintains he can light up additional fibre on the 48-‐ strand pipe whenever it’s required. “Whenever we need fibre we just go ahead and put it in,” he says, adding that fibre optic rings have been installed to each of the resort’s buildings. Even though video traffic currently accounts for 80 percent of all network traffic, Chestnut says quality of service has never been an issue since the backbone is only running at four per cent capacity. “Even with the cameras making up 80 percent of the traffic, 80 per cent of four is nothing,” he says.

Background: A Virtual LAN it is a logical subgroup within a local area network that is created via software rather than manually moving cables in the wiring closet. It combines user stations and network devices into a single unit regardless of the physical LAN segment they are attached to and allows traffic to flow more efficiently within populations of mutual interest. In the Sunshine Village example, at the Sunshine Inn hotel, there may be many computers connected to the same physical network, but the front desk clerk’s computers would appear to be on their own separate network from the computers in use by the wait staff in the bar – hence the virtual part of the VLAN.

P3.Q1 The case uses the acronym “IP” in many different places. What does IP (in the context of Sunshine Village’s new network) stand for?

1. Intellectual Property

1. Internet Protocol

1. Information Proximity

1. Image Processing

1. Interface Poma

P3.Q2 The type of systems that Poma utilizes could best be characterized as:

1. Operational (TPS)

1. Managerial (MIS)

1. Strategic (EIS)

1. ALL of the above

1. NONE of the above.

P3.Q3 WHY did you choose the answer you did for the previous question?

P3.Q4 The URL http://23.99.93.117/ opens up the same webpage as http://www.SkiBanff.com/. What component of the internet makes this possible?

<next page>

P4.Q1 [2 Marks] Since controlling gondolas ferrying people up a mountain remotely has a significant potential for harm, Sunshine Village would want to ensure that their connection to Poma is secure. If the Sunshine Village network only extends as far south as Calgary and the Calgary ⟷ Colorado connection is done via the public internet (vs. a private WAN connection), what technology (and why) should Sunshine Village employ to ensure hackers of malicious intent can’t take over their gondola?

What:

Why:

P4.Q2 [4 Marks] Maintenance record keeping is critical to ensuring safe operation of the ski-‐lifts and gondola. Gondola cars are serially numbered; all work done on a car is recorded in a maintenance database. As the narrative mentions, there are different types of gondola cars (passenger cars and ‘utility cars’ for things like garbage removal). Given these four entities: Gondola, Gondola Car, Car Type, and Maintenance Record, draw the most likely relationships between the various entities, ensuring you denote the relationship cardinalities.

Note: there is no penalty for overlapping lines or violation of the “crow’s feet down” guideline.

P4.Q3 [1 Mark] A database management system (DBMS) separates the logical and physical views of the data. (Circle one of…)

TRUE / FALSE

P4.Q4 [2 Marks] Sure the database that contains the maintenance records for the gondolas must include some metadata. What is “metadata”? Can you explain it?

<next page>

P5.Q1 The database engineers who built some of the systems in use at Sunshine would document the conceptual model of the database with a(n)

1. Data flow diagram.

1. Entity-‐relationship diagram.

1. Decision tree.

1. Systems digaram.

Suppose these database engineers created a database to track the various Mountains and Trails for the Sunshine ski area:

Diagram TWO

Diagram ONE

P5.Q2 Circle your response: “Diagram One | Two refers to the physical implementation of

the Mountains and Trails database, while Diagram One | Two refers to the logical description of mountains and trails.

P5.Q3 àà for the question above, how do you know? Why did you make those choices of diagrams?

P5.Q4 An IP phone call digitizes and breaks up a voice message into data packets.

TRUE / FALSE

<next page>

P6.Q1 (Refer to the diagrams on the previous page) The wee key symbol (ÑÑ) denotes a “Key Field”. What is meant by this term, “key field?”

P6.Q2 The Daily Report table has two key fields – is this an error? Explain:

P6.Q3 Why do keys like “Mtn-‐ID” and “Diff-‐ID” appear in the Trail table? Explain:

BONUS [1 Mark] Use this Family Circus™ cartoon to illustrate any your favourite MIS concept from the course to date:

That ends the Ski Banff / Sunshine mini-‐case + questions section…

<next page>

P7.Q1 This exam uses a computer system called “Crowdmark”. The wee QR code you see up here ▲ ? Each page of this exam has a unique serial number code which is both human readable (something like: 87B92AF5-‐082B-‐4D14-‐ADFD-‐5C67BECEFC79) and computer readable (the QR code). In the case of a large enrollment class, multiple TAs can mark the various parts of a student’s exam paper simultaneously online — there is no need for a paper copy once the exam has been submitted. Grades are returned to students via e-‐mail. Of automate, informate, or transform — which best describes the use of Crowdmark in a university setting? Why?

Use the socio-‐tech systems approach we looked at in class to support your answer. Diagrams, short answer/ point form is fine [10 marks]