The Big-I, the world’s largest unknown insurance company, has offices scattered in 35 cities around the world and has over 735,000,000 insurance policies in force, with a total face value of $53.8...

The Big-I, the world’s largest unknown insurance company, has offices scattered in 35 cities around the world and has over 735,000,000 insurance policies in force, with a total face value of $53.8 trillion. A high-speed inter-office network links Big-I’s 35 offices and its central headquarters (located in a secure underground facility somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.) All policy information is kept in a RAID-5 storage system at the headquarters facility. The agents input information about new policies, changes to existing policies, and customer-relationship changes (marriages/divorces, births, deaths, medical records, court records, etc.) daily. This information may be relevant to a particular customer even though it originated anywhere in the world. For example, Fred Jones, an insured of Big-I in the United States, went on a trip to Paris to celebrate his 50th birthday, became ill, and underwent surgery on the same day his divorce became final in North Carolina. Big-I’s agents in both Paris and North Carolina simultaneously want to access/update Fred’s records to reflect the new information on both his medical condition and his marital status. Describe the relevant design aspects of Big-I’s central storage system. Describe any changes that will be needed if the central storage system is mirrored at a second underground facility several hundred miles away. Big-I just got a new CEO who thinks the central storage idea is old-fashioned and wants to use a distributed approach instead. He proposes to have each of the 36 facilities maintain its own local information store, but still be able to enter and access all information on a customer no matter the location at which it is entered/stored: a globally distributed/ shared-storage system. Describe a transition plan for distributing the centrally stored information back out to the 35 world offices. Describe how the IT Department of Big-I can simulate the network impact of a distributed shared-storage system versus a centrally stored but (potentially) simultaneously accessed storage system.