Our business now has in place a fully operational network solution to
service its application and communication requirements. We operate
over 2 sites in 2 major cities in scotland and use VPN for one of our
offices and home workers to access our main terminal server using
remote desktop and citrix software. We have asked our current solution
providers to recommend a 100% robust proposal which will provide a
disaster recovery and contingency plannig solution for us in the event
of total loss of service at the company’s main server site.
The proposed solution will allow us to operate our network and
application functions to a suitable level outwith our main server site
for up to 40-80 members of staff.  This solution must provide an
exceptional backup routine with loss of data being virtually zero. We
are effectively trying to mirror our current servers "almost live" so
that if one server fails we can or the whole site is down based on
power cuts, fire, flood we can immediately switch to the other mirror
servers by using vpn technology. This system can also be used to "back
up" our data from the main servers each day providing us with even
greater disaster recovery. I would like you to provide us with a
detailed proposal on the options that we have to do what we are
looking for. This could be using a mixture of hardware or remote
services provided by third parties but it is important that you are
specific on the options we have for acheiving what we are looking for
and the plusses and minuses of each. We are very keen to avoid any
operational downtime so the name of the game here is business
continuity. here is our current set up in our head office. Cost is a
factor obvioulsy but we are keen to see what all the solutions might
be irrelevant fo cost.


Current Setup:

We currently house 5 servers in our 4th floor communications room. 
Our two terminal servers are designed to have up to 100 users
connected to a terminal session via Remote Desktop or Citrix ICA at
any one time.  We have up to 30 VPN users at any one time dialling in
to use a session.

 

We also have a custom designed Database Application which sits on the
SQLServer.  This software has been designed to cope with the same
number of users.

 

Our servers are protected by a NETGEAR FVS318 firewall.

 

Terminal Server 01:

Hardware:

4 x Pentium 3 550MHz processors.

2GB Ram

 

Software:

Citrix Metaframe

2 Hard Drives, 60GB Combined capacity.

 

Terminal Server 02:

Hardware:

4 x Pentium 4 1.6GHz Xeon processors.

2GB Ram

2 Hard Drives, 55GB Combined capacity.

 

Software:

Windows 2000 Advanced Server

Citrix Metaframe

 

Storage Server:

Hardware:

1 x Pentium 4 2.0GHz

512MB RAM

80GB

 

Software:

Windows 2000 Advanced Server

 

Exchange Server:

Hardware:

Pentium 3 1266MHz

1024MB RAM

4 Hard Drives, 28GB Combined capacity.

 

Software:

Windows 2000 Advanced Server

Microsoft Exchange Server 2000

 

SQL Server:

Hardware:

Pentium 3 1266MHz

1024MB RAM

 

Software:

Windows 2000 Advanced Server

SQL SERVER 2000