IT Infrastructure Chap 1: Definition Mark Abraham Magumba

The Evolution of IT Infrastructure During the first years IT infrastructures were relatively simple With the advent of more advanced applications like ERP, E-commerce and data ware housing they’ve become more complex Many IT infrastructures are the result of an incremental process of implementation, acquisition and mergers The result it is that most are extremely complex and ineficient with little integration and interoperability

IT infrastructure Definitions The equipment, systems, software, services used in common across organizations regardless of mission, program or project. Also serves as the foundation upon which mission, program and project specific services are built All of the configuration components that are necessary to provide services to the customers All of the hardware, software, networks, facilities e.tc. That are required to deliver, monitor, control or support IT services. The term It infrastructure includes all IT but not associated people, processes and documentation The distributed operational and administrative computing environment hidden from the unseen world of application users

Infrastructure definition contd Different Views of infrastructure Business processes Information Infrastructure for business analyst Application Infrastructure for end user Server Infrastructure for end user Building Electricity

Typical Characteristics of infrastructure Infrastructure provides services to applications Infrastructure is usually shared by multiple applications It infrastructure is more static and permanent than the applications running on it The management of infrastructure is separate from the management of the application running on it The department owning the infrastructure is separate from the department owning the applications

The infrastructure Model

The infrastructure model The model depicts the infrastructure itself and the “users” of the infrastructure The users are the applications that deliver utility to the system users built on top of the infrastructure and these are Middleware and databases Applications Processes and information

Virtualization: Acts as abstraction layer between the hardware and the operating system, it allows a single physical device to run multiple operating systems Operating system: A collection of programs to manage a computers inner workings including its memory, storage, hardware and file system End user devices: The devices used by end users to use to run applications such as PCs, thin clients, smart phones

IT infrastructure building blocks The model also describes the IT infrastructure building blocks Data centers: Typically IT hardware is provided in data centers. These provide (uninterrupted) power supply, cooling, computer racks, availability and security measures Servers: Are physical and main processing units also known as computers found in the data centers Networks: Connect the different components of the data center. Comprise routers, switches, cabling and include LANs, WANs, VPNS and simple services such as DHCP and DNS Storage: Servers can have internal storage like hard disks and external storage like tapes, Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN)

Non Functional Attributes Vertically three essential non functional attributes including availability, security and performance are shown Availability: is about maximizing system uptime and includes elements like backup, restore and disaster recovery, failover, clustering and replication Performance which includes areas such as scaling, load balancing, virtualization, Quality of Service (QoS) and high performance clustering Security which is about minimizing threats and vulnerabilities and includes solutions such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), access control and encryption The three non functional attributes can all be affected by the configuration of each of the infrastructure components Though several other non functional attributes can be defined these three are the most critical