Choosing where to start

Taking a look at our fictitious company, LukeCorp, you may realize that there are many issues with the way things are running for the IT group! Non-standard everything, lack of proper security, lack of direction, lack of motivation to spend money on proper IT equipment/software, and probably much more. Let's dive a little deeper into it, and choose where to start.

Currently, LukeCorp is using an old Windows 2000 system to host everything they need: file sharing, email server, web server, proxy server, firewall, printer sharing, and custom databases in MySQL. Unfortunately, this is only one server, and was built back when RAID-5 was considered the best use for this server. The drives are quite old, and only get changed as needed. Currently, they have 3x Western Digital hard drives, all changed at varying times in the past 10 years. The server is old, and starting to die. There is no backup server, but there are backup tapes.

Their file server requires at least 2 TB worth of storage, and needs to be redundant, while being fast. Their Active Directory service needs to handle the 500 current employees, and offer room for growth as the company gets bigger. You have been given the go ahead to quote a proper server, and move all the clients over. Where do you start?

First off, find out what they want to use the server for. Most of this can be accomplished with high-end hardware, easily costing thousands. You build a server based off the latest Intel Xeon CPUs, hot-swap bays for the hard drives, 128GB of ECC Registered RAM, 6x 1TB Enterprise-class hard drives in a RAID 5 (5TB of storage), single NIC, a 500-user CAL, and 4-hour response from the manufacturer. Total cost? $25,000. Your boss says no after laughing at you. Back to the drawing board...

Where did you go wrong? The cost? The hardware? The RAM? No. The way you presented it may have something to do with it. Do you have all the information you need? Do you know how long you expect this server to last? Does it take into account a backup solution? Is it the best bang-for-buck? Can it be done cheaper? All these are valid questions, so we'll look into it as best as we can for the next few blog posts. We will also show how to properly present this information for you to your boss, and show that it may be required to make business go.