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Chapter 1 • Using Windows Server 2003 Planning Tools and Documentation
A company’s business requirements can include a number of factors that you need tokeep in mind. An obvious issue is that of cost, whether you are interested in improving userefficiency to save money, or pumping cash into high-powered server farms to increase salesrevenue on an e-commerce site.You need to decide how much money your company iswilling to spend, or how much money you expect a new technology to save the company.Either way, if your network design costs more than it ends up making (or saving) for acompany, you’ve failed to meet this critical requirement.This will come up later in thischapter in the “Calculating TCO” section.After you’ve determined the budget for your new network, you should take stock ofthe current state of your company’s computing technology. Ask the following questions:
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What resources are already in place?
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How much needs to be upgraded or replaced?
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What can be reused in the new or upgraded network?
Plan Now or Pay Later
Although completely new network installations are becoming a rarity except whendealing with new construction, they do present their own unique challenges. Whenplanning a new network installation, don’t take even the most basic configurationitems for granted. Here’s a real-world example: A medical supply firm was movingfrom an environment consisting exclusively of mainframes and dumb terminals toan installation of networked PCs and servers. Part of the physical installationincluded running pipes under the flooring to allow the network cabling to runthroughout the building. Unfortunately, the construction manager received hisspecifications from the mainframe administrator, who was relatively unfamiliarwith PC technology. The mainframe manager assumed that the PCs would use the same type ofcable to connect to the routers and hubs that was used by the existing dumb ter-minals. He did not consult with the new LAN administrator, or he would haveknown that the new networked PCs would be using Category 5 (CAT5) Ethernetcabling, which proved to be roughly three times the diameter of the mainframe
Configuring & Implementing...
access terminal cabling. This error wasn’t discovered until after the subfloor pipinghad already been laid; the LAN administrator quickly discovered that there wasn’tenough physical room to run all the necessary cable drops through the too-smallpiping.Rather than incur the increased cost of running the piping all over again, man-agement tasked the LAN administrator with installing network connectors thatwould use the smaller network cabling. This created an excess of performance bot-tlenecks until the subfloor piping was rerun two years later. Remember this true taleof how a seemingly insignificant detail can escalate into a much larger problemwhen you’re establishing the particulars of your network design plan.
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