Week 4 Assignment NET 424

Career Relevancy

Background: You have started a new job as a storage architect for a data warehousing company. Your supervisor has asked you to put together a proposal for a new network based storage system that will be used to be the backend of a several databases and order system data for an ecommerce website. The storage solution should have a fast storage tier for the highly transactional databases and a slower and larger long term tier for saving off order history.

Requirements: The storage solution should have redundant network access paths. These paths should be no less than 1GB per second and support network segmentation, such as virtual LAN tagging (VLANs). The long-term data growth rate is expected to be 100GB each week. Your storage design should be able to last 5 years before a technical refresh of the equipment or the system is decommissioned. Ensure that your storage system can support 5 years of archiving.

You can research and recommend storage solutions from major storage vendors such as EMC, Oracle, NETAPP, Overland, Dell, HP or any other credible solution provider. Include protocols that the storage device will utilize such as FCoE, NFS or ISCSI. You may also design your own storage solution if it has a high availability from redundancies built into your design. Your supervisor will be reviewing your proposal and will point out any design flaws.

Deliverable: Write up a minimum of one page describing your storage design. Include how it will meet the storage requirements for long-term storage of order data. Draw a block level diagram with Visio, PowerPoint or any other drawing software that can be saved as an image (jpeg, pdf or gif). Include network interfaces to web servers and include any network devices needed to support the connectivity. Label interfaces and items such as RAID5 volumes. Create a legend for your diagram to help your supervisor understand the connectivity and layout.

Week 4 Assessment

Career Relevancy

Storage administrators often need to communicate architecture plans to management in order to receive scheduling, funding or other resource approval. By being able to communicate your plans to management, you will greatly increase the chance that you'll receive support from your management and staff.

For this assessment, you will need to create an 8-15 slide presentation on your storage solution from the Week 4 Assignment to present to the IT Manager for approval. Slides should have an IT or business oriented professional theme with a cover page and APA reference slide at the end. A minimum of two APA references are required for the presentation.

Discuss how your storage solution provides simultaneous access for users and applications

Discuss how your storage solution provides access control and data security

Discuss how your storage solution can be expanded should there be a future need for more storage

Discuss how your storage solution presents high availability to the system

Present a notional time frame for the project execution