MIS Assignment 6: IT Consultant
{ Posted on 12:54 PM
by Ariel Serenado
}
If I were asked by the University to be an IT Consultant, I would rather suggest to pursue with the Infrastructure, specifically Internet Infrastructure to enhance the internet connectivity.
One of the greatest things about the Internet is that nobody really owns it. It is a global collection of networks, both big and small. These networks connect together in many different ways to form the single entity that we know as the Internet. In fact, the very name comes from this idea of interconnected networks. With the growth of the Internet for personal use and business purposes, it would be useful to talk about what actually powers all these things. People all over the world are accessing the Internet and corporate intranets via multiple desktop PCs, laptops, handheld computers, and cell phones. Organizations are exchanging critical information via increasingly sophisticated collaborative systems, and consumers are demanding immediate access to richer and richer content, including applications, games, music, videos, and images. To serve this growing demand, enterprises, operators, publishing companies, and other organizations are relying on Internet Infrastructure such as cross-platform mobile-content delivery platforms, multiple-credential authentication solutions, and real-time publishing tools, to mitigate the complexities of delivering digital services while garnering the greatest possible returns. Internet Infrastructure enables important transactions, establishes connections, protects data, and safely distributes critical information across myriad protocols and devices.
What is Infrastructure?
Infrastructure is actually the he basic physical systems. These systems are considered essential for enabling productivity in the economy. Developing infrastructure often requires large initial investment, but the economies of scale tend to be significant.
What is Internet Infrastructure?
In information technology and on the Internet, infrastructure is the physical hardware used to interconnect computers and users. Infrastructure includes the transmission media, including telephone lines, cable television lines, and satellites and antennas, and also the routers, aggregators, repeaters, and other devices that control transmission paths. Infrastructure also includes the software used to send, receive, and manage the signals that are transmitted.
In some usages, infrastructure refers to interconnecting hardware and software and not to computers and other devices that are interconnected. However, to some information technology users, infrastructure is viewed as everything that supports the flow and processing of information.
Infrastructure companies play a significant part in evolving the Internet, both in terms of where the interconnections are placed and made accessible and in terms of how much information can be carried how quickly.
Internet Infrastructure consisting of a ‘Top 5′ areas :
• Data Centers
• Network Connectivity
• Computer Equipment
• Storage Services
• Server Applications
A Data Centre is basically a specialist building that has the ability to power (and cool) massive amounts of computer equipment. Typically a Data Centre would also have a very large amount of network bandwidth to accommodate data transfer in and out of it. Data Centers are built as highly redundant and resilient facilities. The Data Centre is the home for Internet Infrastructure. It is the central point of aggregation and distribution of data and network services. The unit of measurement for a Data Centre is space and power. How much space will the equipment require and how much power will it draw (which is effectively double that, as cooling a server takes about as much power as just having the device operating).
Possibly to most important foundation block of Internet Infrastructure is the Network. Without a network connection no data can pass between Data Centers, over the Internet, and ultimately onto your Desktop, Laptop or Mobile Handset. For the purpose of this post, let’s talk about the network infrastructure in a Data Centre, where data passed in to computer equipment, is processed and/or stored, and passed back out of the DC.
Next you would expect redundant switch gear in the Data Centre in separate racks so again if the switch gear failed, the other set of it would simply take over and no service interruption would be experienced.
The unit of measurement for network connectivity is megabits per second and available megabits on the carrier connection. The ability to meet peak demand is important though, so Data Centres will have a lot more connectivity available than is required for daily operations.
Computer Equipment Now that the two basics of Internet Infrastructure are in place - the ability to power your equipment, and the ability to connect it to the Internet, the next thing is the computer hardware that uses this to process and store the applications and data.
Servers. A Server is a more complex and high-end version of a desktop PC. Servers are housed in Racks in a DC which are typically 42u in height. (1U is 1-unit and a low-end server takes up just 1 of these units, other servers scale within these racks to multiple ‘U’). Racks are normally powered by 2 PDU (Power Distribution Units) which connect to (if available) multiple power supply units in the server.
A low-end installation may be only a single server, which is the simplest form of Internet Infrastructure. The server would be connected to the DC Power, the Network, an OS and other required applications installed on it. Then it is ready to ‘power and push’ data on the Internet. More complex deployments would include pools of servers, with different applications on each one, or clusters of pools for multiple clusters with dedicated application requirements.
The unit of measure for Servers is Processor Power and RAM. Although there is a lot more to selecting a server such as expandability, reliability, network ports, BUS speed, Cache size and speed. Personally I would like the unit of measure in Servers to change, I think for buyers and users it should be rated in ‘MIPS’ - which is ‘Millions of Instructions Per Second’ which is effectively all that matters, and how today’s Mainframe computers (IBM BlueGene is a high end Mainframe) are measured.
Data Storage is a huge part of Internet Infrastructure. All those emails accessible online, all the web pages on your favorite web site are all stored on a hard drive in a DC somewhere. The basic level of storage is on-server storage, which means the hard drives in the computer server. This can cause not just performance and capacity issues, but also redundancy ones - local storage is inherently as prone to failure as the server it is in.
It is common to use specific storage devices - such as Direct Attached Storage (a dedicated and dumb storage appliance connected direct to your server), Network Attached Storage (a storage device that can be accessed by multiple machines over a network connection, and independent of the server itself) and Storage Area Networks, which are high-end, resilient and redundant set-ups that give high performance levels and are very scalable. A Storage Area Network may be shared among many services, applications, servers and customers. The unit of measure in storage is gigabytes (getting to be more commonly terabytes now) and IO’s per second (input-output read/writes the device can perform per second).
The final piece of underlying Internet Infrastructure is the server applications themselves. In order for an web application to be delivered from a server, that server requires an Operation System (typically Windows or Linux), a Web Server application (like Apache or Microsoft IIS), and a Database (such as MySQL, MS-SQL or Oracle). There any many more variations here, but the basic web server has these 3 things. From here you can install blog software, an ecommerce site, your new web 2.0 application, or any Internet capable piece of software (more include - Instant Messaging Server, File Storage Server, Message Board)
More complex applications tend to have dedicated servers, or pools or servers, for specific things - like a cluster of Database Servers, or a pool of Web Server to serve those ‘www.’ page requests. These may also have more complex network setup such as dedicated routers, load balancing and firewall devices (for traffic management and security respectively).
Billions of times each day, companies and consumers rely on our Internet Infrastructure to communicate and conduct commerce with confidence. With a strong heritage in operating Internet Infrastructure, providing industry-proven security services, and delivering a full spectrum of communications solutions. Moreover, it provides interoperability, scalability, and security to meet today’s unprecedented demand for
Information.
Businesses and consumers depend more than ever on the Internet to generate, consume and distribute content—boosting demand for hosted services. To manage increased data volumes and more complex applications amid rising energy costs, Internet infrastructure companies must operate with maximum efficiency while meeting customer expectations for capacity, performance and uninterrupted service availability.
This requires simplifying their own infrastructure to reduce power, boost performance and streamline operations. As strategic partners to Internet infrastructure customers, systems integrators can make storage a key enabler of success, thereby promoting lasting customer loyalty and strong growth for their own businesses.
sources:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm
http://edbyrnehq.com/what-is-internet-infrastructure/
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:2DZoO0RRZz8J:www.verisign.com/corporate/internet-infrastructure-overview.pdf+internet+infrastructure&cd=21&hl=tl&ct=clnk&gl=ph&client=firefox-a
One of the greatest things about the Internet is that nobody really owns it. It is a global collection of networks, both big and small. These networks connect together in many different ways to form the single entity that we know as the Internet. In fact, the very name comes from this idea of interconnected networks. With the growth of the Internet for personal use and business purposes, it would be useful to talk about what actually powers all these things. People all over the world are accessing the Internet and corporate intranets via multiple desktop PCs, laptops, handheld computers, and cell phones. Organizations are exchanging critical information via increasingly sophisticated collaborative systems, and consumers are demanding immediate access to richer and richer content, including applications, games, music, videos, and images. To serve this growing demand, enterprises, operators, publishing companies, and other organizations are relying on Internet Infrastructure such as cross-platform mobile-content delivery platforms, multiple-credential authentication solutions, and real-time publishing tools, to mitigate the complexities of delivering digital services while garnering the greatest possible returns. Internet Infrastructure enables important transactions, establishes connections, protects data, and safely distributes critical information across myriad protocols and devices.
What is Infrastructure?
Infrastructure is actually the he basic physical systems. These systems are considered essential for enabling productivity in the economy. Developing infrastructure often requires large initial investment, but the economies of scale tend to be significant.
What is Internet Infrastructure?
In information technology and on the Internet, infrastructure is the physical hardware used to interconnect computers and users. Infrastructure includes the transmission media, including telephone lines, cable television lines, and satellites and antennas, and also the routers, aggregators, repeaters, and other devices that control transmission paths. Infrastructure also includes the software used to send, receive, and manage the signals that are transmitted.
In some usages, infrastructure refers to interconnecting hardware and software and not to computers and other devices that are interconnected. However, to some information technology users, infrastructure is viewed as everything that supports the flow and processing of information.
Infrastructure companies play a significant part in evolving the Internet, both in terms of where the interconnections are placed and made accessible and in terms of how much information can be carried how quickly.
Internet Infrastructure consisting of a ‘Top 5′ areas :
• Data Centers
• Network Connectivity
• Computer Equipment
• Storage Services
• Server Applications
Data Centre
A Data Centre is basically a specialist building that has the ability to power (and cool) massive amounts of computer equipment. Typically a Data Centre would also have a very large amount of network bandwidth to accommodate data transfer in and out of it. Data Centers are built as highly redundant and resilient facilities. The Data Centre is the home for Internet Infrastructure. It is the central point of aggregation and distribution of data and network services. The unit of measurement for a Data Centre is space and power. How much space will the equipment require and how much power will it draw (which is effectively double that, as cooling a server takes about as much power as just having the device operating).
Network
Possibly to most important foundation block of Internet Infrastructure is the Network. Without a network connection no data can pass between Data Centers, over the Internet, and ultimately onto your Desktop, Laptop or Mobile Handset. For the purpose of this post, let’s talk about the network infrastructure in a Data Centre, where data passed in to computer equipment, is processed and/or stored, and passed back out of the DC.
Next you would expect redundant switch gear in the Data Centre in separate racks so again if the switch gear failed, the other set of it would simply take over and no service interruption would be experienced.
The unit of measurement for network connectivity is megabits per second and available megabits on the carrier connection. The ability to meet peak demand is important though, so Data Centres will have a lot more connectivity available than is required for daily operations.
Computer Equipment Now that the two basics of Internet Infrastructure are in place - the ability to power your equipment, and the ability to connect it to the Internet, the next thing is the computer hardware that uses this to process and store the applications and data.
Servers. A Server is a more complex and high-end version of a desktop PC. Servers are housed in Racks in a DC which are typically 42u in height. (1U is 1-unit and a low-end server takes up just 1 of these units, other servers scale within these racks to multiple ‘U’). Racks are normally powered by 2 PDU (Power Distribution Units) which connect to (if available) multiple power supply units in the server.
A low-end installation may be only a single server, which is the simplest form of Internet Infrastructure. The server would be connected to the DC Power, the Network, an OS and other required applications installed on it. Then it is ready to ‘power and push’ data on the Internet. More complex deployments would include pools of servers, with different applications on each one, or clusters of pools for multiple clusters with dedicated application requirements.
The unit of measure for Servers is Processor Power and RAM. Although there is a lot more to selecting a server such as expandability, reliability, network ports, BUS speed, Cache size and speed. Personally I would like the unit of measure in Servers to change, I think for buyers and users it should be rated in ‘MIPS’ - which is ‘Millions of Instructions Per Second’ which is effectively all that matters, and how today’s Mainframe computers (IBM BlueGene is a high end Mainframe) are measured.
Storage Services
Data Storage is a huge part of Internet Infrastructure. All those emails accessible online, all the web pages on your favorite web site are all stored on a hard drive in a DC somewhere. The basic level of storage is on-server storage, which means the hard drives in the computer server. This can cause not just performance and capacity issues, but also redundancy ones - local storage is inherently as prone to failure as the server it is in.
It is common to use specific storage devices - such as Direct Attached Storage (a dedicated and dumb storage appliance connected direct to your server), Network Attached Storage (a storage device that can be accessed by multiple machines over a network connection, and independent of the server itself) and Storage Area Networks, which are high-end, resilient and redundant set-ups that give high performance levels and are very scalable. A Storage Area Network may be shared among many services, applications, servers and customers. The unit of measure in storage is gigabytes (getting to be more commonly terabytes now) and IO’s per second (input-output read/writes the device can perform per second).
Server Applications
The final piece of underlying Internet Infrastructure is the server applications themselves. In order for an web application to be delivered from a server, that server requires an Operation System (typically Windows or Linux), a Web Server application (like Apache or Microsoft IIS), and a Database (such as MySQL, MS-SQL or Oracle). There any many more variations here, but the basic web server has these 3 things. From here you can install blog software, an ecommerce site, your new web 2.0 application, or any Internet capable piece of software (more include - Instant Messaging Server, File Storage Server, Message Board)
More complex applications tend to have dedicated servers, or pools or servers, for specific things - like a cluster of Database Servers, or a pool of Web Server to serve those ‘www.’ page requests. These may also have more complex network setup such as dedicated routers, load balancing and firewall devices (for traffic management and security respectively).
Billions of times each day, companies and consumers rely on our Internet Infrastructure to communicate and conduct commerce with confidence. With a strong heritage in operating Internet Infrastructure, providing industry-proven security services, and delivering a full spectrum of communications solutions. Moreover, it provides interoperability, scalability, and security to meet today’s unprecedented demand for
Information.
Internet Infrastructure Services
Businesses and consumers depend more than ever on the Internet to generate, consume and distribute content—boosting demand for hosted services. To manage increased data volumes and more complex applications amid rising energy costs, Internet infrastructure companies must operate with maximum efficiency while meeting customer expectations for capacity, performance and uninterrupted service availability.
This requires simplifying their own infrastructure to reduce power, boost performance and streamline operations. As strategic partners to Internet infrastructure customers, systems integrators can make storage a key enabler of success, thereby promoting lasting customer loyalty and strong growth for their own businesses.
sources:
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet-infrastructure.htm
http://edbyrnehq.com/what-is-internet-infrastructure/
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:2DZoO0RRZz8J:www.verisign.com/corporate/internet-infrastructure-overview.pdf+internet+infrastructure&cd=21&hl=tl&ct=clnk&gl=ph&client=firefox-a
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