Case Study

Londons Private Healthcare Provider (LPHP) is a newly established (Imaginary) healthcare services and products company based in London. They provide healthcare services and products such as healthcare financing, research, home care, assisted living, health informatics and finally primary and secondary care. The company is scheduled to start its operation from the first quarter of the next financial year, 2013. They dont have any branches anywhere in the UK at the moment. However, even though they are a new company, they are expecting to have about 80 employees in their office in Richmond, London. They are currently looking at establishing the required human resource base and other infrastructure including a stable and robust IT system to support the various company operations.

Assume that you have been recently appointed as a Network System Administrator for the company to plan and setup a robust network system as well as support the system continuously to meet the IT requirements of the company. Understanding the future operation and expansion of companys business, identifying various hardware and software needs and their organization to deliver a reliable IT services is your prime challenge. Based on your requirement analysis, you have proposed to setup a Server based system with Client operating system for 100 client computers (For their employees, other services and future expansion) with appropriate justifications. Realizing your excellent proposal, the concerned authorities have approved your proposal.

Deliverables

LO 1

1.1 A hardware specification for the servers and clients ensuring hardware compatibility list to take optimum & cost-effective advantages for Server Operating System and Client Operating System.
1.2 Install a server operating system - create boot partition - install from CD - configure a static IP address for the server - Configure the DHCP server service to issue IP addresses
1.3 Install a client operating system - configure the client to obtain an IP address automatically - create hardware profiles to selectively boot the client as a standalone computer and as a network client - add new hardware and/or update existing hardware
1.4 A planning and design report to implement print servers to take advantage of a limited number of printers accessible from all clients on a priority basis.
1.5 A recommendation for supporting mobile computers to be used by mobile staffs taking advantage of proposed network resources.

LO 2

2.1 Prepare a report to implement RAID system and/or Clustering to protect business data and operating system environments with justification.
2.2 Prepare a report describing disaster recovery plan and techniques which include a cost-benefit analysis, any specialized devices and technology proposed and key personnel and their roles.

LO 3

3.1 Present your expert advice to the marketing director with possible use of terminal services to allow for sharing of application and reduced cost of ownership
3.2 Prepare a brief plan with justification to incorporate various dedicated services like Directory services, File Servers, IIS, DNS, DHCP and WINS in future in your current network model.
3.3 Install terminal services and terminal services client and conduct remote administration of users and servers
3.4 Perform a network installation of client computers including network install of a service pack

LO 4

4.1Monitor the performance of the print server over time to identify: - processor usage - memory usage - disk utilization - network usage - (ideally the server should have few hardware resources i.e. slow processor, small amount of RAM etc.)
4.2 View and archive event logs
4.3 Search for specific events
4.4 Archive an event log and demonstrate searching through a saved log file
4.5 Load an archived log into a database or spreadsheet program and format the output