Guest snoflake Posted December 8, 2007 Posted December 8, 2007 I am taking a networking class at the moment, and I have gotten pretty bogged down with lots of the jargon and am a little at my wits end. As of right now, I have "hospital" that I am constructing a logical network for. In one module we were given a list of servers and each department that they were found in. Now, five Modules down the road, We are given a list of departments, a list of the duties that they fulfill on a daily basis, and what their requirements are. My task is to decide, based on what info I am given, on how many servers they need, what type of server they will be (clustered, mirrored), the bandwidth requirements (that is least consequence at the moment. I will get to that), and the servers' storage capacity. I am having some trouble. I have two parents that work in a hospital, and the primary application that they work on is all one application. IT handles room assignments, medical records, integration with X-ray imagery, charting, etc. To me, that is how I plan on structuring this network. I would have a central application handling the data entry, billing, room assignments, etc. Maybe not the facilities management (water, sprinklers, safety, security). But most of the floor staff would run this one app. However, Should there just be one application server? Or more? There are roughly 200 users. To me it seems like overkill, and entirely too much to keep up with from a management standpoint...but should each department have their own application server, running their instance of the application, but have all of the servers eventually point to one centralized database server, where the records are stored? And with clustering, I was told that essentially it is for doing large computations...so if you have multiple users, it is not necessarily one gigantic query...it is multiple small instances. So how would clustering be involved in an environment such as this? And if the data is all essentially stored centrally, would one mirror do? Or should there be one on sight, and one mirrored at a completely different location geographically due to possible environmental disasters/natural phenomenon? I am slightly confused.
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