Plains Research Institute is a private organization of 22 physical chemists and a business management staff of eight, including a computer support professional. The organization obtains research grants from corporations and government organizations to develop new or enhance existing chemical processes. For example, one group of chemists is researching the development of automotive engines to run on hydrogen. Another group of chemists is developing a better way to extract natural gas from coal-bed geologic formations and pump the natural gas to customers.

Plains Research Institute has leased a building on a university campus for five years, but now the university has other plans for that building, and so Plains Research Institute is purchasing a new building. They want to network the building and have hired you through Network Design Consultants. The building is a single-story building. All of the employees use either Windows 7 Professional or Fedora Linux on their workstations. The organization also has four Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and one Windows Server 2008 R2 server. The old network in the university building contained a combination of unmanaged hubs and unmanaged switches. Because the Plains Research Institute president and management staff are very concerned about security, they have decided this will be a wired Ethernet network without a wireless component.

What network devices do you recommend for connecting the workstations to the network?