Founded in 1990, Century Pharmaceuticals Ltd is a regional Australian pharmaceutical company that delivers pharmaceutical supply chain services to a number of nursing care facilities in regional Australia. The company has some 100 staff, which includes management, administrative staff and other pharmaceutical staff. Century Pharmaceutical has a small data centre at its main site at Wagga where the company’s servers and data storage is located. The company has the following server infrastructure at its data centre:
- 2x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2;
- 3x MySQL database servers on Windows Server 2008 R2;
- 1x Exchange 2007 Email Server on Windows Server 2008 R2;
- 4x Windows Server 2003 File and Print Servers;
- 2x Red Hat Enterprise 5 Linux Server running Apache and TomCat.
The management of the Century Pharmaceuticals Ltd is concerned about the increasing costs of power and cooling to operate their data centre. The management also wants to increase the reliability of the services, reduce the desktop support loads and accelerate desktop provisioning to the staff. They are investigating whether they should employ a virtualisation technology in their data centre to enhance the data centre efficiency while keeping the cost low. They are also considering whether they should use virtualisation to provide an updated desktop environment to their staff.
The Challenge
You are to consider how to implement a virtual infrastructure for the company and prepare a report for the management. Your report should include:
- One page executive summary
- Proposed virtual infrastructure for the data centre including which virtual technology is recommended and the reasons for that recommendation
- Analysis of how virtual applications and desktops or both will be delivered to the user’s desktops.
- Design disaster recovery / backup system
- Information security changes required and the steps required to implement / monitor these changes
- Final approximate price for your proposal
Rationale
This assessment item is designed to assess the understanding and use of some advanced topics in virtualisation, analytical skills, planning and design capabilities of students under some predefined requirements. In particular, the assessment covers the following learning objectives:
- be able to communicate the importance of different virtualisation technologies for x86 and Unix based systems;
- be able to evaluate which virtualisation technology should be used in a given set of requirements;
- be able to identify and evaluate the requirements to create a virtual infrastructure; and
- be able to analyse the requirements for management of a virtual infrastructure.
Marking criteria
The following rubric will be used when assessing each component in this assignment.
| Item | HD | DI | CR | PS | FL |
| Executive Summary | A complete summary of the solution and main points of the report. | A highly detailed explanation of main points of the report. | A thorough explanation of main points of the report. | An adequate explanation of main points of the report. | An incomplete, irrelevant or not sufficient information. |
| Virtual infrastructure proposal | A concise and to the point proposal of virtual infrastructure with justification supported by literature | A concise and to the point proposal of virtual infrastructure with justification | A concise and to the point proposal of virtual infrastructure with justification supported by literature | An adequate description and reasoning of the proposed virtual infrastructure for data centres. | An incomplete, irrelevant or not sufficient information. |
| Analysis of desktops / applications delivery to users | Provides complete analysis and makes suggestion on desktops / applications delivery to users | Provides detailed analysis and make some suggestions on desktops / applications delivery to users | Provides short and brief analysis and make some suggestions on desktops / applications delivery to users | Provides short analysis on desktops / applications delivery to users | An incomplete, irrelevant or not sufficient information. |
| Disaster recovery / backup plan | A comprehensive description of disaster recovery plans for the infrastructure. | A highly detailed description of disaster recovery plans for the infrastructure. | A thorough description of disaster recovery plans for the infrastructure. | An adequate description of disaster recovery plans for the infrastructure. | An incomplete, irrelevant or not sufficient information. |
| Describe information security plan | A comprehensive description of the information security changes needed | A highly detailed discussion on the information security changes needed in this environment. | A thorough discussion on the information security changes needed in this environment. | An adequate discussion on the information security changes needed in this environment. | An incomplete, irrelevant or not sufficient information. |
| Presentation & referencing | Marks will be deducted for poor presentation, spelling and grammar mistakes.Note please follow the given report format in Subject Outline for this assessment.Marks will be deducted for not providing / following the proper APA style referencing.Note that the guide for APA referencing is provided in the Resource section of Interact site. |
