Acme Telecom is involved in mobile wireless services across the United States and has about 5000 employees worldwide. The company is Chicago-based and has 7 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.
Some of the current situations and issues that the company is facing are:
- 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 6 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.
For this discussion:
- Describe how you think the company should restructure their environment.
- Justify your choice based on cost, performance, and availability of the new solution.