Final Project Guidelines

COMS 4713

For your final project, you will be integrating all of the topics discussed in the class. You will take the position of a consultant, who is designing a network infrastructure (and related policies) for a business. In forming this infrastructure, you will need to consider the needs of the business (both the customers and the employees), budgeting, and physical infrastructure. You will be dealing with a network of 50 client terminals, and at least 2 servers. For this project, you will need to provide the following:

1. A brief statement about what sort of business you are supporting. I will need enough detail so that I can evaluate your choices in the context of the business environment, but don t need an exhaustive summary of every possible detail. Include anything that would be relevant to the decisions you will be making in terms of your network, data center, etc. 2. A summary of how you have chosen to implement your new IT environment. For this, you will need to specify where you are using Linux or Windows, and in what quantity. A (non-exhaustive) list of things to include in this summary is: A. Network organization, both physical and logical. B. Quantity and model of servers. Remember that you are setting up a data center. C. Allocation of resources in the data center (which server does what and why). D. Justification of your decisions E. Any diagrams/pictures/whatever you might need. 3. A security policy for your new IT setup. You will need to include both a software security policy, in terms of network and password security, and a physical policy. The physical policy should be for both server/network physical threat abatement and for protecting critical resources (as in the class example). 4. Plans for providing a data center for your business. Pick one office/classroom and detail what changes you would need to make to provide an appropriate onsite data center. 5. A budget for your project. See the assumptions listed below for help on this. 6. An executive summary of the project, with attention to justifying the total cost and your implementation decisions. This should be a non-technical document, suitable for presentation to a (probably clueless) manager.

Assumptions: y y You are a contractor, and you will bill the company at the rate of $100/hr. The client systems you will be using cost $500 each for a bare system, adding a Windows license costs an additional $75 a machine (plus your setup time). Adding Linux costs an appropriate amount based on your setup time commitments. A server will cost $5000 for the bare system. Adding Windows 2k8 (or 2K3) Server will cost an additional $2700, or Linux for $800 (per year -- you want a supported version for your server) plus setup time. If your environment uses custom software, it is assumed that the licenses are already paid; you will not have to account for those charges.

This will be due Monday, April 4 at midnight. If you have any questions, please e-mail me or drop by my office. If you d like me to peruse a rough draft, feel free to e-mail it over. I will do so as time allows. If anyone has an interesting question/clarification regarding this, I will e-mail the class as appropriate so that everyone may benefit.