Fun project - Need advice

[JamesC]

I am doing a project for my network design class where we create a fake company and plan out the technology for it. Everything from the name of the business and the company's budget to the floor plan and the network technology.

My company headquarters building is 3 stories (120,000 sq ft) and serves about 5000 employees. first story is the lobby/auditorium, second story is a call center and the server rooms, and the top story holds the executive offices and conference rooms.

Questions:
1. Does my overall building layout seem logical? For example, should a call center and server room go in middle floor of a 3 story building?

2. How many servers will I need for 5000 clients? How many servers per client? (Assuming active directory or similar)

3. What kind of backbone technology? Obviously fibre optics but more specific.

4. Any other information about topology. What would be ideal for this environment?

5. How many storage servers just for customer data? (1 million home users)

You don't have to "create" my company since that's my job, but any advice or pointers would be great. Let me know if you need any more information about the company.

 

[lovely?]

wow 5k employees? a central networking hub should probably be on the second floor for efficiency, so you have to design the building as well?

on the final question, what would your service be doing? online picture management, for example, would need alot more storage then a forum, or a few forums based in your corporation. in essence, most websites alot about one GB to you, like yahoo.com for example, so 1million gb's??? that would take quite a few servers, if you had 1tb hard drives, depending on the capacity of the servers

also most large corporations have backup storage in safe places, away from the main buildings.

 

[JamesC]

wow 5k employees? a central networking hub should probably be on the second floor for efficiency, so you have to design the building as well?

Yes, I am designing the building as well.
Also, I changed from 5000 to 2000 employees and made it 5 stories. Note that it's not 2000 employees at all times, if you take in to account shifts it's about 800-1000 at any one time.

1st floor: lobby, cafeteria, gym, auditorium (about 20 PCs)
2nd floor: call center, conference rooms (about 150 PCs)
3rd + 4th floors: call center, offices (about 150 PCs)
5th floor: executive offices, board room, server rooms (30 PCs + Servers)

What I plan on using is an OC48 SONET with 1 multiplexer per floor (150 users or so). Would this be about right for 500ish computers? I want very fast and secure access as a major corporation headquarters should have.

on the final question, what would your service be doing? online picture management, for example, would need alot more storage then a forum, or a few forums based in your corporation. in essence, most websites alot about one GB to you, like yahoo.com for example, so 1million gb's??? that would take quite a few servers, if you had 1tb hard drives, depending on the capacity of the servers

It's a security business very similar to Symantec. Similar size and budget. It would mostly be storing customer account data and maybe some statistics. I asked because I am not sure what other information they would store. Symantec has TBs of customer data but I don't know what it consists of.

also most large corporations have backup storage in safe places, away from the main buildings.

Good point, though that wouldn't be up to me. I have a storage room with the server room for the main backups.

 

[Zorrowannabe9]

haha good change on the employee #s there James. Your old numbers were very impractical and unrealistic. I work in a large 2 story animation company that has 700 people.

 

[JamesC]

haha good change on the employee #s there James. Your old numbers were very impractical and unrealistic. I work in a large 2 story animation company that has 700 people.

You wouldn't happen to know what kind of network setup it has do you?


Here is the topology of just the server room so far... each floor (cloud) connects to a 12 port switch and Fiber to Ethernet converter on that floor that then branches off to the rest of the rooms. Does it work?