Case Study

Existing Environment

Over the past few months, Insane Systems has been developing plans to expand their company. They have identified San Jose, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and New York City as the locations with their highest customer base. The current Chicago location will remain the corporate headquarters, but they are opening branches in New York City and San Jose. They are also in the process of acquiring a competitor s business in Atlanta. These locations provide retail outlets as well as support. Customers will have the option of sending their systems back for any needed upgrades or repairs to the corporate office, or delivering them to one of the branch locations.

Because the company is planning on expanding, they want to make sure that the network infrastructure is in place to support their larger, distributed company. They are also concerned with the support lifetime of their current Windows NT 4 infrastructure. They realize they have the option of moving to a Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 infrastructure and are considering moving to Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory for two reasons: the expected support lifetime is greater than Windows 2000, and they are a technology firm that is not afraid of staying ahead of the technology curve.

Interviews

Part of the expansion of the company is a complete overhaul of their current Internet presence. They are planning on bringing all of the web development and hosting in-house. Currently a web hosting service is providing their Internet presence, and Insane Systems feels as though they could provide better marketing and support information for their customers if they had control over their own website.

Your company has been hired to design an Active Directory infrastructure and the network infrastructure to support it. During the interview process with some of the key stakeholders you gathered the following information:

CEO

Currently we have a single location with all of our processes local. As we grow, we would like to keep all of the administration here in Chicago. Because the new branches are primarily retail and support offices, we will not need to have a large staff in those locations.

CIO

Most of the infrastructure that we support is located here at the corporate office. We do support some key servers at the manufacturing location. We support these servers from our main office. Because the servers are nearby, if there is a problem, we can usually be on site within half an hour .

The new branches are going to be another issue altogether. We would like to retain the same level of administrative control over the servers in the new locations that we employ currently. Due to the geographic limitations, we may need to have some support staff at those locations. Currently, the plan is to hire staff at those locations that can provide the support for the customers, but also have an understanding of the business systems we need to put into place.

Manager of Information Technology

We have grown very quickly over the past three years and our current technologies have kept up with that growth. However, we don t think the current infrastructure is ready for the amount of growth that we are expecting within the following year. We are not afraid of moving to the latest technology, but we want to make sure that the design is stable and makes sense for us, especially if we will continue growing in the upcoming months. And because we are losing support for NT 4, we want to make sure that we have an operating system that will be supported for a few years down the road.

Most of our processes are located here at this office, and we would like to keep it that way. We know that servers will need to be located at the remote offices, but we would like to be able to provide most of the support from this location. Remote administration tools will need to be included within the design so that we can keep our administrative costs at a minimum.

Currently, we have most of our servers located at the main office, and all located on their own high-speed backbone. We do have a server at the manufacturing site that allows the staff there to have e-mail as well as plans and orders in case we lose connectivity between the offices. This server is running Exchange 5.5. Several times during the day we replicate the public folder information to this system so that they are always up-to-date and do not have to dial up to the main office using our 56Kbps modem.

The systems at the main office are all supported by our staff of four administrators. All of the administrators are cross-trained on Windows NT 4, Exchange 5.5, SQL Server 7, our accounting software, and each of our file and print servers. We currently have several Windows NT 4 servers in place, including one Exchange 5.5 server at both locations, one SQL Server 7 server at the main office, one server running our accounting package that interfaces with the SQL server, and one file and print server that is used by both locations. The Exchange server at the manufacturing location doubles as a print server also.

Because all of the client machines are running Windows NT 4 Workstation, we do not have to worry about supporting different operating systems. We would like to maintain that same easy administration with the upcoming system. We would like to provide the same types of services at the remote locations that we provide at the home office, although accounting will remain at the home office and will not be spread out to all of the locations.