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Mega-Corp Scope and Requirements Analysis

Introduction
I have chosen Mega-Corp as my network reorganization project organization. This organization
can be restructured to run very uniformly. Mega-Corp is a multi-national corporation consisting of the
following three main companies:
Canned Fruits and Vegetables All located in Newark, New Jersey. The organizational
users consist of 40 employees at the corporate office and 100 at the warehouse/distribution
center. The primary software solution utilized is PeopleSoft ERP.
Tasty Fried Foods (TFF) Corporate headquarters and two locations in Atlanta, Georgia;
three locations are in Charlotte, South Carolina; and two in Nashville, Tennessee. TFF has 12
organizational users in the six restaurants and 25 at the corporate office. NuRol Dine In, API
Payroll Service, and Microsoft Office 2003 are the primary applications utilized.
Not As Tasty Health Foods Corporate headquarters, Warehouse and Distribution
Center (DC) are in San Francisco, California, and an additional DC is based in Napa Valley,
California. There are sixty organizational users in the warehouse/distribution center and five at
the corporate office. The applications used are, Home Grown Business Management, Star
Office, and Gmail.
Mega-Corp companies are overseen by a set of senior managers for each organization who
report to a single board of directors. The products are secure; however, profits have been down
throughout all areas in the past two years.
IT projects for Mega-Corp are proposed, funded, and implemented for each organization
independently and are not part of the oversight duties of the corporate board. Each organization has an IT
steering committee that evaluates and funds projects they approve. I propose the creation of a Chief
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Information Officer and a structured, internal IT department. This would cut costs and give the
corporation the direction they need with IT a part of the board (Capella, 2012).
Mega-Corp companies have selected a variety of network architectures (Capella, 2012).
Not as Tasty Health Foods has chosen Linux-based systems, which they maintain and
operate using in-house talent (Capella, 2012).
Tasty Fried Foods has outsourced their IT projects and network management
responsibilities to Berbee (Capella, 2012).
Canned Fruits and Vegetables are running their own Windows 2003 and Active Directory-
based networks (Capella, 2012).
The Mega-Corp network design can be streamlined by constructing a unified organizational
network between all three companies. By utilizing the same hardware and software solutions, the system
will be uniform and maintenance/down-time will be minimal. PeopleSoft and Microsoft Office 2010 look
like the logical choice for all to adopt for the day to day business. These two suites cover all the listed
requirements for each company.
Scope and Requirements
The Mega-Corp board of directors has asked the IT directors of their organizations to get together
and devise a plan for reducing IT costs by 20 percent. We have been asked to eliminate the existing
network and security architecture and create a deliverable consisting of a new organizational network and
security architecture that supports this cost reduction by increasing centralized administration and
reducing purchasing costs associated with supporting so many different networking solutions (Capella,
2012).
An upgrade of this caliber will require new hardware, software, and end user training. The goal of
having the network system uniform is crucial due to the consistency of the network components and
software solutions. This will save on repairs and down-time and allow for an inventory of general back-up
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gear. Training and learnability will also be greatly enhanced for the organizational users by having the
systems uniform vs. many software packages and network designs.
The organizational users are the employees throughout the various organizations. Typically the
end user who operates an application device such as a workstation, tablet, or smartphone connected to
the network. The network requirements consist of eliminating the existing network and security
architecture and creating a new organizational network and security architecture that supports cost
reduction by increasing centralized supervision and reducing costs by deploying a unified network,
software, and security solution.
Hardware
For the local servers located at the new, main corporate data center, I choose the Dell
PowerEdge R720 in a multi-tier configuration. The Dell PowerEdge R720 is configured using two Intel
Xeon E5-2640 2.50GHz, 15M Cache, 7.2GT/s QPI, Turbo, 6C, 95W, Max Mem 1333MHz. I selected
8GB RDIMM, 1333 MHz, Low Volt, Dual Rank, x4, 16 total DIMMs for 128 GB of RAM.
The individual workstations will be Dell OptiPlex 990 Small Form Factor with the Intel Core i7
2600 Processor (3.4GHz, 8M), 8GB DDR3,Non-ECC,1333MHz Dual Channel SDRAM, 128GB 2.5
3.0Gb/s Solid State SATA with 8MB Cache.
Decisions
When designing or reworking a network configuration, decisions are of the utmost importance.
There are so many possibilities for a solution; critical thinking and decision making must come
into play. The chance of a bad decision costing the organization time and money is too great to
be taken lightly.
An important (and often overlooked) part of network analysis is the documentation that
provides information about decision making in the network architecture and design
processes. During the analysis process we are gathering data that can be used to
determine which architectural and design decisions need to be made, details regarding
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each decision (including reasons for each decision), dependencies between decisions,
and any background material used to arrive at these decisions (McCabe, 2007, p.22).
Decisions made regarding the network architecture and design need to be defensible
from several perspectives: technical, in order to be able to address any technical
challenges made against your architecture and design; budgetary, to ensure that network
costs are within budget or to justify why a budget has been exceeded; schedule, to
ensure that time frames for development, installation, testing, and operations are being
met; and resources, such as personnel or equipment, to ensure that the customer has
everything necessary to build and operate this network (McCabe, 2007, p.23).
An audit trail is also useful as a historical document about the network. Over time, after
the network is made operational, new network personnel can review this document to
understand the logic behind the way the network was designed. Ideally, this document
should be periodically reviewed, with new information added regarding changes to the
network. Thus, an audit trail becomes a history for that network (McCabe, 2007, p.23).
Realistic Assumptions