Question

1. What is IT infrastructure and what are its components?

2.What are the stages and technology drivers of IT infrastructure evolution?

3. What are the current trends in computer hardware platforms? Describe the evolving mobile platform, grid computing, and cloud computing

4. What are the current trends in software platforms? Define and describe open source software and Linux and explain their business benefits.

5.What are the challenges of managing IT infrastructure and management solutions? Name and describe the management challenges posed by IT infrastructure

Answer 1

1.IT infrastructure is defined as a shared technology resources which is sum of all free and licensed system software,third party services,owned or leased equipment that provide the platform for the firm’s specific information system applications. IT infrastructure includes hardware, software, and services that are shared across the entire firm.

2.The stages of IT infrastructure evolutions is began on the year 1930 and still it is continuing.

Electronic Accounting Machine-(1930-1950)->This era is began to replace Human effort from accounting work.Machine started doing accounting and finance work effectivly and much more errorfree than Human.

General-Purpose mainframe and minicomputer Era(1959-continuing)->This era has been started by IBM, And it still persist in the position of supplying mainframe computer.Mainframe computers are centralized computing with networks of terminal concentrated in the computing department.In the mean while early models contained proprietary software and data.Mainframe comuters able to process a wide variety of software and data ,It could able to process huge amounts of data and transmission.

Personal Computer Era(1980 to Present)->Personal computers make a boom in both Home and corporate sector .Personal computer makers like Microsoft and Apple take forward the evolution by providing Desktops and Laptops which doubles the User effort.

Client/Server Era(1983 to Present)->as the desktop and laptop personal computers became more powerful and cheaper, businesses began using them to replace mini-computers and some mainframe computers by networking them together. Think of an octopus, with the body representing the server and the tentacles representing the clients. At the heart of every network is a server. It can be a mainframe, midrange, minicomputer, workstation, or a souped-up personal computer.The client computer is the node on the network that users need to access and process transactions and data through the network. Rather than one server trying to do it all, each server is assigned a specific task on an application server.

Enterprise Internet computing Era(1992 to Present)->Perhaps no other era has seen the explosive growth in functionality and popularity as this era. The problems created by proprietary, closed systems are being solved by the standards and open-source software created in this era. The promise of truly integrated hardware, software, and services is coming true with the technological advances in the last fifteen years. On the other hand, the promises of delivering critical business information painlessly and seamlessly across all organizational levels are made all the more difficult to match because of the ever-changing landscape of technology products and services.

3.While the cost of computing has fallen, IT infrastructure expenditures have grown due to the rising cost of computing services, software, and the increase in intensity and sophistication of computing.

Telecommunications and computing platforms have converged: at the client level, with the merging of PDAs and cell phones, and at the server and network level, with the rise of Internet telephony.

Grid computing utilizes the idle computational resources of separate, geographically remote computers to create a single virtual supercomputer. In this process, a server computer breaks data and applications into discrete chunks that are parceled out to the grid's machines. Grid computing offers increased cost savings, computational speed and agility.

On-demand computing, or utility computing, refers to firms off-loading peak demand for computing power to remote, large-scale data processing centers. This allows firms to reduce their investment in IT infrastructure by investing in only as much computing power as needed on average and paying for additional power on an as-needed basis. This arrangement offers firms much greater agility and flexibility in their infrastructure.

Autonomic computing is an industry-wide effort to develop systems that can configure, optimize, repair, and protect themselves against intruders and viruses, in an effort to free system administrators from routine system management, reduce costly system crashes. Today's virus software with automatic virus updates is one example of autonomic computing.

Edge computing is a multi-tier, load-balancing scheme for Web-based applications in which parts of the Web site content and processing are performed by smaller, less expensive servers located near the computer. In an edge computing platform client requests are initially processed by the edge servers, which may deliver static presentation content, reusable code, while database and business logic components are delivered by the enterprise servers.

4.Open source software is produced and maintained by a global community of programmers and is often downloadable for free. Linux is a powerful, resilient open source operating system that can run on multiple hardware platforms and is used widely to run Web servers. Java is an operating-system– and hardware-independent programming language that is the leading interactive programming environment for the Web. Web services are loosely coupled software components based on open Web standards that work with any application software and operating system. They can be used as components of Web-based applications linking the systems of two different organizations or to link disparate systems of a single company. Companies are purchasing their new software applications from outside sources, including software packages, by outsourcing custom application development to an external vendor (that may be offshore), or by renting online software services (SaaS). Mashups combine two different software services to create new software applications and services. Apps are small pieces of software that run on the Internet, on a computer, or on a mobile phone and are generally delivered over the Internet.\

Open source software is produced and maintained by a global community of programmers and is often downloadable for free. Linux is a powerful, resilient open source operating system that can run on multiple hardware platforms and is used widely

5.The Challenges are as follows

-Cost of IT infrastructure
-Integration of information, applications, and platforms
- Flexibility to respond to business environments
- Resilience
- Service levels

While designing a server room or data center these are the challenges

-Server sizing and load balancing

-Storage capacity planning.

-Intrernet connectivity and securing architecture

-Disaster recovery planning