Table Of ContentSjaak Laan
IT Infrastructure Architecture
Infrastructure Building Blocks and Concepts
Third Edition
Title: IT Infrastructure Architecture –
Infrastructure Building Blocks and Concepts
Third Edition
Author: Sjaak Laan
Publisher: Lulu Press Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-326-92569-7
Edition: Third edition, 2017
Copyright: © Sjaak Laan, 2017
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the book.
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
Thomas Watson, IBM Chairman, 1943
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home
Ken Olsen, founder of legendary minicomputer company DEC, 1977
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in
which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan, American astronomer, 1990
It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast
machine slow.
Craig Bruce
INTRODUCTION
In the summer of 2011, Sjaak showed me the first ever printed version of the
book he had been working on for quite some time. It was also the first time we
discussed in detail the reasons for writing it, and the target audience that he was
aiming for. After some hours of discussing the contents of the book Sjaak asked
me if I was willing to write the introduction for it. Needless to say, I was
flattered and proud he suggested this.
At first I was puzzled about his decision to have the introduction written by
someone who is not directly involved in core IT infrastructures, but much more
into software development. For 17 years, my company has been developing back
and front office applications for large multinationals, and is currently involved in
SaaS solutions in the field of Social Media Intelligence, Online Health
Applications, Event Management, and Storage Management. As I am much
more into the "soft-side" of automation, it was like if a car designer asked a road
designer to write an introduction on engine mechanics.
But from a different point of view, it seemed very obvious. Where would
software application developers be when the infrastructures their applications
run on were not working flawlessly? How many times have we been in meetings
with customers trying to figure out why software applications were not
performing as they were supposed to? How many times did it occur that after
implementation of a new software system we were confronted with unforeseen
costs because the underlying computer systems had difficulties running the
developed software? How many times did we accuse the infrastructure guys of
not understanding the requirements and vice versa?
I strongly believe that most of these problems originate from a lack of
knowledge software engineers have about the problems and challenges
infrastructure specialists face when setting up a system for running the software
we develop. We as software engineers are primarily concerned with functionality
required by the customer. Customer assume that when they talk about an
application handling 100,000 visitors a day, or running large reports on millions
of records, software engineers fully understands their needs. And indeed,
software engineers understand everything regarding select statements, thread
handling, and database calls, but they will also assume that the hardware and
operating systems they build upon are capable of supporting this.
I think there is a great need for software engineers to understand more about IT
infrastructures to allow them to communicate with the infrastructure architects
on a more professional level.
What was really appealing to me in this book was that it was written out of
experience, rather than presenting just theoretical knowledge. Far too often we
see that decisions made on IT infrastructures have little sense of reality. For
security and availability sake, systems are often made far too complex, hence far
too expensive, resulting in a system even less secure and less reliable than
intended. Sjaak has hit the nail right on the head with his chapters on availability
and security. What this book really shows is that the biggest risks for failures and
security breaches are not in the infrastructure itself, “but it sits between the chair
and the keyboard”.
A good example, from my own experience, was the case where we needed to
implement a contingency plan, including an emergency response team. In order
to minimize downtime in case of a failure, we found it was much more effective
to see who of the systems management team was living closest to the datacenter,
than to focus on "putting the best man on the job". We were better off training
the guy living next door, then to have the chief infrastructure manager drive 1.5
hours to the datacenter!
The entire book is an excellent piece of work to be read by each software
developer, it is an outstanding educational tool for system engineers and it is
great reference material for IT consultants, regardless of the specific area they
expertise on.
If you take IT seriously, you have to read this book!
Herman Vissia PhD, M.Sc.
Herman Vissia is the CEO and owner of Byelex Multimedia Products B.V.
Together with his colleagues from Minsk he has written more than 10 scientific
articles on software related technologies, more specifically on Artificial
intelligence and sentiment analysis on the World Wide Web. In 2012 he earned
his PhD from the State University in Minsk, Belarus.
FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR
When I started writing this book I tried to remember the first time I came in
contact with technical infrastructures. And then I realized I have been in the
infrastructure business almost all my life.
When I was six years old, I spent an entire afternoon figuring out how to connect
a D-type battery to a bicycle light bulb using a small wire in order to get it to
lighten up. For some reason, I could not get it to work. While I tried endlessly
my mother (not very technical herself) told me to wait for my father to return
from his work, so he could explain to me how to do it. When my father finally
arrived, and explained what I did wrong, and when the light bulb finally
lightened, I was very excited. My first electrical circuit worked! It made quite an
impression as I still remember it after all these years.
From that moment on I explored all types of technical equipment. I disassembled
my new toys and my alarm clock, just to see how they worked. After
disassembling, sometimes I managed to get the pieces back together again to get
a working device, but most of the time the toys, radios and other equipment were
not working anymore after my exploration. It drove my parents crazy. Sorry for
that, mum and dad!
When I was around 14 years old, I was building electronics hardware in my
spare time. Starting from rebuilding electronic circuits from Elektor magazine, I
quickly started to design my own hardware. While most of those hardware
projects were just for fun, when I was about 18 years old, I designed and built
electronic devices for the photo lab company a friend of mine worked for.
th
For my 18 birthday I got a very special (and for my parents very expensive)
present – a Sinclair ZX-81 home computer, including a 16 kB memory
expansion module. After writing my very first program in BASIC (tic-tac-toe,
which I lost from the computer all the time) I could not resist opening up the
computer to examine its inner workings. After breaking down the computer and
fixing it, I eventually expanded the system to connect to an external keyboard.
