Re: New Job.

["Will Yonker" <aragonx () dcsnow com>]

<quote who="Que">
> Howard,
>
> The first thing you need to do is ask questions to the
> employees, owners, managers, etc.  What is the primary
> purpose of this network, is it to share information
> amongst the worker bees, or is it to merely provide a
> more fluid path to the internet?  You need to first
> determine what type of information is important to
> this particular company and who needs access to it
> before you can design and, more importantly, protect
> this information.

This is the first response that started hinting at the security aspect of
this job.  Quite surprising for a security focused list.  lol

Anyway, it seems to me that with the information you provided, we can't
make any reasonable suggestions as to how you should setup your network. 
There is one major thing to take into account.  Although they may be
throwing money at you now, that will change.  You of course should design
your network with security in mind.  DMZs with separation of services if
the size and risk warrants it.

***Plan your annual budget***

Many CFOs don't mind large one time expenditures but will really balk at
recurring costs.  If you tell them they need <insert number here> new
servers, they may say ok.  If you then tell them they will need to budget
for replacing them every 5 years, you'll probably get a different answer. 
The first thing that usually happens is they get out their calculator and
divide the server cost by 5 to see the impact to their annual budgets.

You don't want to get yourself in a situation where you have designed this
large network but cannot get the budget to maintain it.  One thing all
users have in common:  They have no tolerance for outages and/or
slowdowns.

Hope this helps.