Slightly off topic - network design question

[rachelle]

I don't do network design. I don't work in the private sector. I have a friend that owns a 24/7 company that seriously needs to beef up their IT and voice solution. They have really grown and need help. How does a small, Mom and Pop type company get the serious IT solutions that they need, when they have no IT knowledge to bring to the table? Are there hosted solutions available from telco or maybe cable companies? This is a company of 7 people. They are in the Louisville, KY market. If you were to design a solution for this tiny company, what would it be?

They want:
5 new PCs
5 phone lines
to have voice mail on all lines
to have an auto attendant, to direct calls
a multifunctional fax, scanner, printer
to network the PCs to have centralized storage of their policies and procedures library
to hold in ready storage 7 years of financial records
to have redundancy, in case of hardware failure
to have redundancy, in case of fire
to have a UPS installed


Like I said in the subject line, this is slightly off topic but, VoIP and network hosted services may be just what these non-techies need. What are your thoughts?



rlc




no matter where you go, there you are.
"This participation is persona and does not represent the United States Census Bureau." They make me say this.

 

[rachelle]

I forgot a requirement. They also want to be able to VPN and work remotely, from a laptop. They also want their voice mail to either go to their email or otherwise remotely notify them of messages.

Sorry, I forgot the whole 'remote' access portion of this scenario.



rlc

no matter where you go, there you are.
"This participation is persona and does not represent the United States Census Bureau." They make me say this.

 

[meneerB]

hire a guy to set it up...

a windows server has storage capabilities, vpn dialin but no failover. do they only need hardisc storage or also an application server for their emailsystem or financial system etc etc?

if not, a very good alterative for a local filesever is to buy 2 NAS devices for the storage of your homedrives,department drive and financial records
-for example qnap.com has raid1 boxes (mirrored discs) and a standard option to synchronize all data to the second box on an other geographical location. (in case of fire only, you should always make backups!)

and one vpn router.
-for 100-300$ there are many soho routers with buildin vpn funtionality.


outsource voice to a voip provider is a good option. All voip phones talk tcp/ip and sip. so, they can be connected over the internet to the voip provider. they can also provide functionality you need on a fixed montly fee per phone.

copy, print, fax, scan to mail or to folder: a mfp (multifunctional) has it all.

connect the pcs, printer, nas, vpn/firewall/router to a gigabit switch and you are ready.
you may use a poweroverethernet (PoE) switch, but they are more expensive. so you also could use a localpower adapter for only 5 (voip/ip)phones.

I miss email in your request:
if you don't want a difficult, local, server: use google.
the company can use their own domainname, for the company, you have access to your email all over the world and lots of space, and backup.

and buy a APC ups to use fo the nas + router and if nessecary also for the pc's

hope this helpes!