Instructions
Do both scenarios. The paper should be 2-3 pages, single-spaced and in APA format. Cite all resources appropriately and include an appendix if you need supporting material. Use graphics as needed to illustrate specific concepts or points.
Business Profile
Acme Telecom is involved in mobile wireless services across the United States and has about 5,000 employees worldwide. This company is Chicago-based and has seven regional offices across the country. Although Acme is doing well financially, they continue to feel competitive pressure. As a result, the company needs to ensure that the IT infrastructure takes advantage of fault tolerant features.
Current Situation/Issues
The company uses a number of different applications for communication, accounting, and management. All the applications are hosted on individual servers with disks configured as RAID 0.
All financial activity is managed and tracked by a single accounting application. It is very important for the accounting data to be highly available.
The application performs around 15% write operations, and the remaining 85 % are reads.
The accounting data is currently stored on a 5-disk RAID 0 set. Each disk has an advertised formatted capacity of 200 GB, and the total size of their files is 730 GB.
The company performs nightly backups and removes old information-so the amount of data is unlikely to change much over the next six months.
The company is approaching the end of the financial year and the IT budget is depleted. Buying even one new disk drive will not be possible.
Proposal
How would you suggest that the company restructure their environment? You will need to justify your choice based on cost, performance, and availability of the new solution.
RAID level to use: Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Business Profile
Acme Telecom is involved in mobile wireless services across the United States and has about 5,000 employees worldwide. This company is Chicago-based and has seven regional offices across the country. Although Acme is doing well financially, they continue to feel competitive pressure. As a result, the company needs to ensure that the IT infrastructure takes advantage of fault tolerant features.
Current Situation/Issues
The company uses a number of different applications for communication, accounting, and management. All the applications were hosted on individual servers with disks configured as RAID 0.
The company changed the RAID level of their accounting application based on your recommendations six months ago.
It is now the beginning of a new financial year and the IT department has an increased budget. You are called in to recommend changes to their database environment.
You investigate their database environment closely and observe that the data is stored on a 6-disk RAID 0 set. Each disk has an advertised formatted capacity of 200 GB and the total size of their files is 900 GB. The amount of data is likely to change by 30 % over the next six months and your solution must accommodate this growth.
The application performs around 40% write operations, and the remaining 60% are reads. The average size of a read or write is small, at around 2 KB.
Proposal
How would you suggest that they restructure their environment? A new 200 GB disk drive costs $1,000. The controller can handle all commonly used RAID levels, so will not need replaced.
What is the cost of the new solution? Justify your choice based on cost, performance, and data availability of the new solution.
RAID level to use: Advantages:
Disadvantages: