Getting Started, Planning Infrastructure setup.

[BigGunz]

As most of you have noticed we have had a few issues with keeping the site up.
This was mostly caused by the domain provider as well as a few other things that came into play.

Now that the issues seem to be resolved the site should be up for good.
Do to these issues however , I thought of some things that may just prove useful when putting your server systems together. These are, in my opinion, the most important things you can do to have a strong server environment.

1. Planning: The infrastructure of your network.
One simple thing that may help when designing the infrastructure for a network is that the software is only as good as the network that it works with, and the network is only as good as the software using it. Coming up with a perfect balance for both is one of the biggest challenges any Network design will encounter.

a. Deciding what your doing with the server is based mostly on what the business is about and will help you decide whether you will need one or more systems to run it. Active Directory, SQL, Web/FTP, Email, etc. Determine how many of these you will combine together on a single server. This will help you decided how powerful you need this server to be as well as who you will choose as your ISP. These are two big factors, as everything revolves around them.

b. Routers, switches, wireless access points and cables. All these have to be taken into consideration when your planning out an infrastructure. The way I like to start is by finding out what software I will be using and how much bandwidth will be needed to work all of them consistently.
Once you added up the total bandwidth required by the software, it is time to decided on the cable as it will assist in choosing the hardware it will be connected to. The other thing to remember is that cables have range limits. In most scenarios that contain multi server situations, going with highest speed and least interference would be ideal. Fiber optics is normally the best choices for this scenario, as it provides all the necessities required for the higher bandwidth demand between servers and switches/routers. There is no use for this if the amount of client PCs are less then 50-75, also it depends if the software used is client or server side. This can be seen in the fig 1.1 which is a quick draft of a medium to large business network. Although most businesses would have multiple internet connections as backups.
Once the cable is decided, choosing the proper hardware is also important, ie. A 20 port Ethernet switch with 19 ports connected to an Ethernet router, seems right for the basic network enthusiast, but if the business does really well and they add 19 more network clients, a second switch will need to be added which will cause more strain on the rest of the network as well as bottle necking. The trick with this is "Plan Ahead". Going with more switches could be better as long as bottle necking is taken into account. Consider a network as a Highway, The router being a junction were 2 highways meet, going from what originally 4 lanes down to 2. like cars on the highway, the information being transferred will have the same issue, which eventually becomes a traffic jam. Using cat5e or 6e from the computer to the switch is perfect, but from switch to router and router to server to modem and out to the Internet. Using something like optical cables from switches to the router will improve network performance. This is called Traffic shaping.

c. Next is the firewalls. As seen in fig 1.1 the there are 2 firewalls, one on each side of the modem. This is always the best way to go about it. Most of the time the ISP provides the one on there end. The second one would be one that needs to be purchased. As for which one, I will be adding a thread in the security section, under "Networking 101" showing some of the best rated firewalls on the market. For now, just look for one that has the option to be manually configured, as opposed to pre-configured, and if you prefer some are also have GUI based configuration options.


To be continued...