Planning is the first step in building a reliable, secure, high-performance and highly available Windows Server 2003-based network. In this chapter, we begin with an overview of network infrastructure planning, introducing you to planning strategies and how to use planning tools.
We will review the fundamentals of network design, including analysis of organizational needs. These include factors such as information flow, management model, organizational structure, and issues of centralization versus decentralization. We discuss management priorities, including availability and fault tolerance, security, scalability, performance, and cost. Next, we address user priorities, which include e-mail communications, scheduling and task management, project collaboration, data storage and retrieval, Internet research, application services, print services, and graphics/audio/video services.
This chapter also looks at legal and regulatory considerations, how to calculate total cost of ownership (TCO), and how to plan for future growth. We discuss how to develop a test network environment, and how to document the planning and network design process.