Question

1. Think about a company you know well. What would be an example of IT architecture at that company? What about IT infrastructure? What is the difference between a decentralized architecture and a centralized architecture?

Answer 1

Let's take the company as WIPRO

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ARCHITECTURE is the process of development of methodical information technology specifications, models, and guidelines, using a variety of Information Technology notations, for example, UML, within a coherent Information Technology architecture framework, following formal and informal Information Technology solution, enterprise, and infrastructure architecture processes. These processes have been developed in the past few decades in response to the requirement for a coherent, consistent approach to the delivery of information technology capabilities.

INFRASTRUCTURE ARCHITECTURE: The blueprint is a building plan for the IT Infrastructure of an organization showing the IT concepts that are part of the IT architecture, the elements of the concepts and the components that implement the elements.

CENTRALIZED ARCHITECTURE represents multiple client-single servers like architecture where the server computer is the one where all of the major processing is done. It even has more computing resources than its clients.

Client machines connect to the server computer (we can also call this as the master computer), and submit their requests.

A typical example of centralized architecture would be NFS (Network File System). There is a single NFS File Server machine that actually hosts all the file system data and meta-data. Client machines run a client-side component (NFS Client) that allows the machines to mount the remote file system locally on respective Operating Systems.

The term “DECENTRALIZED“ can refer to the location of the individual communication devices in the network, but usually, it is more about the functional organization or in other words the way these devices interact when a function is executed.

As long as only basic functions have to be considered, e.g. push-to-talk communication between two subscribers or broadcasting of simple announcements, the corresponding terminal devices can easily manage the communication without the need of a coordinating central control unit.More complex functions which require the management of several stations mostly need a central unit. Examples are the management of speech direction in half-duplex conferences or the provision of conference channels in full-duplex conferences.