| Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
V. Server Considerations
The questions in this section are concerned with how well any servers being purchased will meet Tufts' requirements, fit into the existing and planned technology environment, and make acceptable demands on available resources.
Resources:
Jim Stiles, Saul Tannenbaum, A. J. Heidkamp, Marje Tedoldi
- Have you determined that you're acquiring sufficient CPU, memory, disk, and network adaptors to support the application that will be running on the server?
- Have projections been developed to predict application growth and concomitant increases in capacity requirements?
- Have funds been budgeted to cover increased capacity requirements?
- Has redundancy been built into the server design (e.g., power supply, fan, disk mirroring or RAID)? Have high availability and disaster recovery requirements been considered?
- Has consideration been given to outage handling, recovery and outage prevention?
- Is the server warranty adequate?
- What kind of support does the server vendor provide? Is it adequate to meet your needs? Have funds and resources been budgeted for ongoing support?
- Has consideration been given to locating the server in a secure location?
- If the server is to be located in the UIT data center, have the appropriate people been included in the planning? Are there funds to cover any wiring, rack mounts or other special needs?
- Has consideration been given to backing up the server, frequency of back-ups, recovery from a back-up and off-site storage of back-up files?
- Have arrangements been made for virus protection, security, encryption or firewall protection consistent with Tufts's existing practices and standards?
- Have arrangements been made for regular disk defragmentation, if necessary?
- Who will be responsible for ongoing monitoring and tuning the server, the console server (if present) and/or data bases?
- Who will document and be responsible for server shutdown and reboot procedures?
- Has consideration been given to power and cooling requirements? For example, some systems require a dedicated circuits?
- Has consideration been given to the kinds of maintenance and support availability that will be needed? What kinds of support response times does the vendor make available?
- Has consideration been given to an extended support agreement as a way to reduce costs?
- How will replacement of parts be handled? Will the vendor come on site to install replacements, ship parts to you for replacement or require return of the server for part replacement?
- Have funds been allocated to cover delivery and installation costs?
- Have delivery logistics been worked out? For example, will a lift gate be required to unload the equipment?
- Is the server scaleable? Can it accommodate additional hardware, for example?
- Can the operating system and/or application be pre-loaded before the server is shipped?
- Has consideration been given to establishing and maintaining call lists?
- What operating system will the server run? Has consideration been given to who is going to maintain it?
- If the server will be using a Windows operating system, will it be stand-alone or will it need to be part of the Tufts's domain? If the latter, have arrangements been made with the local IT organizations?
- Will a remote console be required? If it is, who will have access to it?
- Has consideration been given to who will have root, administrator or other special account access?
| Introduction | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
