Introduction to IT Infrastructure

hello my name is Herman Ratana from in kind business schools in Costa Rica this video is meant to teach business executives the very very basic things of IT infrastructure they should know as economies become more digital it is necessary for executives to have at least a basic understanding of how straw for applications work in this video we will cover first off the basic elements of an IT infrastructure some basic vocabulary we will talk about what our data centers what our servers and clients and also what network devices are then we're going to see how we interconnect all these devices we're going to talk about communication media and then we're going to offer a brief categorization of the different types of data networks we find out there in the wild let's start talking about the data center a data center like the one I show you on the right is to start off a physical space where the servers and network devices are all located it is usually a special place that is conditioned for this purpose and it will have some access control for security such that only the people allowed to touch the servers will actually do so the servers and network devices emit heat so we want to cool them and there will be very powerful cooling devices and in them we also want to supply power but not just any power but actually redundant power supplies and so forth so it's a rule conditioned prepared to host our servers because after all this is where our production applications and our firms are going to be running the data centers are usually organized in racks which can be thought of as cabinets vertical cabinets where we can assemble or organize our equipment when we talk about devices that are installed in racks we're going to be talking about rack mounted devices and something very important that data centers are going to vary significantly in size whereas a small and medium enterprise might have a very very small room that function as a data center larger firms such as fortune 500 or technology giants such as Google's Facebook's Amazon's of the world will have data centers that spanned several soccer fields in space I encourage you to click on the link on the bottom right of the screen to watch a video that takes you inside a Google Data Center you will see that the cooling devices are not the traditional air-conditioning systems we might see at homes but actually even water-cooled systems for these tremendous data centers the master of data center is the person of a system administrator system administrator can traditionally be seen as this know-it-all person who really knows how every single element inside the data center is connected there's very powerful sophisticated engineer however not all data centers look like the ones I've shown you on the pictures sometimes our data center might be a complete mess where we don't know where things are connected and in these cases the system administrator cannot do much more than pray that nothing falls the nothing breaks and that the systems continue operating and you might think that nowadays organizing a data center is fairly simple all wood we need is a diagram well let me show you how diagrams looked back in the day this figure right here is the network diagram of Purdue University Indiana in 1994 it's fairly complex it's a fairly small installation its University 20 plus years ago and you might think well that's all we could do when we did not have computers to draw diagrams for us so maybe our expectation is diagrammed like the one I'm showing you now this could have been made with PowerPoint or Visio and it clearly shows two different devices such as servers clients switches access points and also the access to the Internet however this is a static diagram that is not too useful to system administrators citizen administrators need to monitor the performance of every single node connected to a network for this they might use an open-source tool called na hues which shows in green and red shades to the performances of the different devices or nodes on the network networks are built off a series of elements that we're going to be talking about next this diagram shows you the typical elements we're going to find in any land any local area network and as such they represent the devices that we might find in every single firm if a business is using IT chances are all of these elements or at least most of them are going to be as part of their IT infrastructure within this network we will find servers we will find clients we will find network devices and so forth and let's talk about each of these starting with the ones on the left the server's a server we must understand is nothing more than a computer that serves or supplies the data and applications used by clients sometimes we're going to give servers names based on the functions they perform and in line with this we might talk about a file server a server that has as function to share files with potential users Linux based Samba servers for more traditional file transfer protocols FTP protocol servers would allow us to share files with our users these by the way have been replaced by modern cloud-based systems such as Google Drive or Dropbox we may also have a print server this is a server that manages the queue of printing requests by all users in a firm you don't print directly to a printer but rather you send it to the server and then the server distributes the workloads through the printers in the firm we may also have web servers if you ever wondered how is it that web pages are displayed when you're open your browser send your laptops well the browser's are being connected to web servers several software can perform the function of a web server we have open source Apache which is by far the most popular web server in the world and UNIX is coming out as a new alternative to Apache which has as characteristic that is very slimmed down it performs very few functions but in a very efficient manner moving to more classic web servers we have Microsoft Internet Information Services server we also have application servers these are the servers that run the enterprise applications such as an ERP system for example s AP or any other application developed locally by the firm mail servers which were widely used before the emergence of office 365 or Google's Gmail such as Microsoft Exchange or Zimbra were used in firms to handle all the mail of the users another type of server present in almost any firm is going to be a database server these servers organize the data used by all the information systems in the firm examples of these are Microsoft sequel server Oracle or my sequel or Medea database which are open source alternatives sometimes we have servers that are used for video streaming or to share photographs to host the photo gallery for example these are called media servers and we may also find servers that enable users to collaborate with each other to work in concurrent forms such as Microsoft SharePoint or IBM Lotus another way we can name servers is based on their platform and by platform I mean there are hardware and operating system we can refer to their Hardware based on the make and model similar to how we talk about a Toyota Corolla the make and model of a car we can talk about an IBM PC rias server we will also refer to the server's operating system just as how your laptops run Windows or Mac OS a server can run in operating systems such as Microsoft Windows Server we could also have a distribution of Linux such as Red Hat Linux Debian Ubuntu or others out there more classic servers may run UNIX as their operating systems so putting all this together we might find examples such as an IBM PC Rios with Linux a Dell PowerEdge server running Windows or we could simply refer to a Linux server or a Linux to refer to a certain box a certain server running the Linux operating system another way we can categorize or classify servers is based on their features or organization and here I'm going to be talking about mainframes high availability servers clustered servers or virtual servers let's start with the first one mainframes a mainframe is a very very large multifunctional equipment these servers are capable of running a huge number of transactions and supporting the workloads of thousands of users they will generally cost millions of dollars and will generally be found only in Fortune 500's or big financial firms firms that have enough workloads to justify the investment in one of these humongous servers if you want to learn more about these I encourage you to click on the link takes you on a brief tour of what the IBM Z enterprise system technology is which is basically how modern mainframes look like worth mentioning if we were to draw a mainframe in a network diagram the icon on the bottom right part of the screen is the one we would use to represent the mainframe in our network diagram then not as large as mainframes but yes geared or designed to host a firm's production applications we have what we called high availability servers these servers are very powerful pcs or very powerful servers that have elements that make them highly available and what do we mean by this for example one of the typical things that will fail on a server it's one of its hard drives but a high availability server will have multiple of these hard drives such that if one of its hard drives fails the others continue performing the same functions sometimes these are arranged in what we call a raid array a redundant array of inexpensive disks which offer redundancy to the hard drives we will also not have a single power supply a power supply is the element by which electricity flows into the server we're not going to have one we're going to have multiple of them in a redundant manner similarly network interfaces or network cards can burn out and we're going to have multiple of them in case one of them fails the cost of these is not going to be millions of dollars but yes the few thousand dollars now not referring so much to a single server but rather to a group of servers we can have what we call as a cluster of servers what is a cluster a cluster is a group of servers that perform the same function in parallel in this sense we can have multiple web servers or multiple data servers that distributes the workloads of a firm amongst themselves the fact that in order to increase capacity I do not have to make my single server larger but I can rather add more servers to my architecture is what makes a cluster of servers particularly scalable there are several ways in which I can organize this cluster of servers for example we can have what we call us a primary server and secondary or slave servers that will only come online if the first server happened to come down sometimes this is referred to as a cold backup in the sense that we usually only have one server running in only if this primary server comes down it's slave or it's secondary server comes online we may also have what we call a hot redundancy case in which we have two or more servers concurrently running performing the same functions in this case we would have servers functioning as mirrors of each other so in this regard we say that having a cluster will increase the availability of the servers not by making a single server more powerful or more available but rather by having redundancy across different servers if we were to draw a cluster of servers on a network diagram the icon we could use is 1s2 shown on the bottom right part of the screens moving to our final type of servers we can speak of virtual servers and what is a virtual server in layman's terms we could describe it as a server within a server and what do we mean by this let's take a big physical host this could be a high availability server or it could be a mainframe and let's install a software tool call a hypervisor on this server and within this hypervisor or on top of this hypervisor we're going to be running multiple virtual machines so how does this work if you look at this in terms of the IT stack trying to understand what do we need to run a software application we first need Hardware CPUs memory and storage devices that are part of any server and on this Hardware we're going to install the operating system so for example we could install Linux on top of our hardware now within the Linux we will install what we call as a hypervisor and what is a hypervisor it is a software tool that allows us to segment or partition the entire server in multiple portions and then create virtual servers or smaller sized servers within this hypervisor and we can have multiple virtual servers running within a hypervisor the most common hypervisor and corporations is that offered by VMware and in particular VMware ESXi this software is traditionally used by corporations and it has been out since the late 90s I believe to run virtual service within servers a competition of VMware and that in this case is also available as open source is send server send server has become particularly popular in the cloud context because site ryx offers a more refined version of send server that is the one used by cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon or Rackspace recall cloud infrastructure service providers offer virtual servers to their customers on their public clouds another example of hypervisors you might be familiar with is the software used in laptops and in particular Mac computers to run a Windows within the Mac computers VMware has an offering design for laptops called VMware fusion but other solutions competition of VMware fusion are Oracle's VirtualBox and parallels these are software's that we're going to install in our laptops that run one operating system and we installed this software to run another alternate operating system within our laptops let's move to another element of the local area network we're done with servers let's start talking about clients what our clients clients are the devices that access the servers thus they are the hardware used to input and output information by final users and they're going to be the means by which we access the servers or other clients examples of clients are going to be the standard PCs and laptops we see every day now back in the day in which we only had mainframes we could talk about to dump terminals a dump terminal was nothing more than a screen on a keyboard that we would use in the late 80s to connect to a mainframe basically users would have no competing how at their desks but rather all the computing power was hosted at the mainframes and all we had in our desk was a keyboard and a screen to interact with the mainframe computer not too far from that we have what we nowadays called networked computers networked computers don't have too much processing power but they have just enough power to run a virtualized desktop that is running off a in other servers somewhere in the world so all what we have is a very slim device on our desk that allows us to see the screen of a virtual desktop running elsewhere in the world another example of clients are what we call transactional terminals these are clients designed to perform a very specific function if you think about it the banks ATMs which we use to withdraw cash have a single function which is served to connect the physical customer with the bank's information systems another type of thin client that we might use for a single function is a point of sale these point of sale devices do not need to be powerful computers since all the functions they perform are those related to the checkout process at a retail store and finally we have all our mobile devices starting from smart phones moving on to tablets watches wearables basically anything that can move so note that the term client refers to anything that is connected to a network and that in turn can be used by the user to connect to services offered by servers let's move on to our final set of devices namely the networked devices that interconnect all the servers and clients and let's talk about switches access point routers and modems let's start with access points access points are these devices you might have seen on walls or ceilings and that have antennas these antennas are the means by which devices such as our smart phones or laptops that also have antennas connect to a local air network we will basically have our laptops interacting with an Access Point and the access point is in turn connected to the local layer network of a firm and thus through this wireless device we're able to access all the services in the local area network now some of you might have seen these devices in your apartments or homes these devices are kind of tricky because they do have antennas so they function as access points but at the same time they interconnect all the devices in the apartment which is the function of a switch and they also route the traffic of our apartment or house to the outside Network in this case our internet service providers network or the Internet so these devices sometimes manufactured by Lynx's d-link or other manufacturers are a sort of three-in-one combo that has an access point a switch on a router so let me talk specifically about switches and routers independently to clarify what these do a switch is nothing more than a junction point where cables come in and cables come out the smallest version of these might be a very small eight pour switch and what's going to happen here is that data coming through any of the individual ports of the switch will go out by any of the other ports in the switch so it's basically again a junction point for everyone to communicate with everyone else connected to a switch in a firm however we will not find such small switches rather we might find switches with 24 or 48 ports that are very slim and they are slim because we're going to organize them in the racks we spoke about when we talked about data centers and this is how a series of switches might look that iraq on a particular data center so once again access points allow us to connect to the local air network via wireless radio signals and switches interconnect all the devices within the network now once we want to go outside of the network we need to route the traffic from a local air network on to or towards other networks and for this we use a router a router is going to be the device that interconnects different local air networks and the ones I'm showing you right now might be routers used by a firm however if you're a larger corporation in particular an internet service provider the router might look like the size of an entire cabinet or an entire rack this is the router that might be used by in cable company or an Internet service provider and that's it for the network devices but how do we connect network devices with each other and with servicing clients let's now talk about the communication media and there's going to be two basic types of media namely wired or cables and wireless moving on to cables what we typically know as a network cable is also known as an Ethernet cable or UTP cable UTP stands for unshielded twisted-pair and we refer to twisted pairs for the little trillings of copper cables we see in the cable the jacks of these cables look very similar to the traditional phone jacks and all the laptops might have network ports to which we can connect one of these cables although laptops generally nowadays only connect through wireless means another type of copper cable used to transmit data are copper coaxial cables through these cables we can cover much larger distance than with the UTP cables mentioned before you might have seen them as the cables used for televisions and basically you can transmit data through the same cables through which we can transmit to analog TV signals also if your internet service provider works with cable modems this is the kind of cable that will be reaching you it's a coaxial cable more and more we need faster speeds and more reliable cables and this is what has driven the usage of fiber-optic cables rather than transmitting electric signals to the copper we're now transmitting light through the fiber-optic cables the two main benefits of using fiber-optic cables are speed and distance we can cover much greater distances with fiber optic cables than we can with copper and also we can transmit the data we can transmit the light at much faster speeds moving on to wireless perhaps the moment I sets wireless the first thing you thought of was Wi-Fi hotspot a Wi-Fi hotspot is nothing more than an access point that allows us to connect to a network in particular local layer network sometimes we connect to a hotspot to access the Internet however we must understand that before accessing the Internet we're really connecting to the local layer network of whatever place we are and from there a router takes us from the local layer network onto the Internet that being said there is much more wireless communication media than just Wi-Fi for example take cellular networks 3G 4G and whatever there is to come cellular network antennas look like the ones in the picture and they are a form of wireless communication another type of wireless communication is through microwaves and antennas look like the ones in the photo up on the right side communication to microwave antennas is characterized by needing line-of-sight meaning that you must have a clear straight line from one antenna to another to have direct communication we will talk more about these when we mentioned metropolitan area networks in just a second and as a final example of wireless communication I want to mention satellite communications these of course go all the way into outer space but they also qualify as wireless communication so far we have mentioned a wide array of devices and servers and perhaps it is best at this point to make a pause in introducing new concepts and talk to you about an example the example I want to describe to you is very close to many of those watching this video and it is a quick tour inside the small data center we have in our Costa Rica campus here at Inc I let's watch the video we're entering into our data center you can see it's locked you can see all the ethernet cables these are patched ports that are going all throughout campus these devices down here are the switches through which all the traffic of our network passes now here we have fiber-optic cables that route our backbone network you can see we are also connected to the Internet through fiber optic cables we have further networking equipment on our second rack here several servers routers firewalls switches and we finally have the UPS and planetary power supplies the batteries which are turned on in case we lose main power here into the data center we have several servers which are rack-mounted servers and we also have a more old school server working on its own just a standalone server we can see temperature is maintained very cool around 20 degrees Celsius and something very important about those locations that it has its independent electricity supply a final topic I want to address on this video is the type of networks we can talk about based on their geographic extension and what I mean by geographic extensions can become clear as we go through the examples I'm going to be talking about local area networks backbone networks metropolitan area networks and wide area networks so let's start with the local area network which is the one we've been talking about since earlier in the video a local area network is going to occupy the space of a room or a building it's going to have all the elements we've talked about namely switches routers servers clients printers all the ones we've been talking about they interconnect everything within a room or within a building typical speeds of these networks are going to range between the 100 megabits per second and the 1 gigabit per second they're meant for nearby communication between devices but in a firm we can have multiple buildings with the example on the right I inviting you to imagine a firm that has several buildings in one firm they have them in one building they have their manufacturing facility in another building they have all the people working on maintenance all their stock and inventories historian warehouses and they have another building just for the administrative staff and we need a mechanism to interconnect all these buildings with each other the network we're going to be using to interconnect the buildings is what we would call a backbone Network the scale of a backbone network is going to be less than a few kilometers the elements that compose or that build up the backbone network are going to be local layer networks and the devices we need to interconnect the local air networks within each building so we will be having here high speed switches and routers and we will also have high speed circuits circuit is the formal name we give to links with the network so when you talk about high speed circuits we will quite likely be referring to fiber optic cables used to interconnect two different buildings at high data rates the typical speeds of a backbone Network will range between the one to 40 gigabits per second moving to an even broader extension we can talk about a firm having multiple branches multiple locations within say a city or within a metropolitan area think of a bank that has multiple branches scattered throughout the city the scale of the metropolitan area network is then going to be more than a few kilometers what we will have is different buildings different facilities actually interconnected by circuits that in this case the circuits are going to be quite likely leased to public providers such as a cable company why don't we use our own fiber optic cables well because it is very expensive to throw fiber-optic cables on our own privately-owned cable from one location to another which is 10 20 30 kilometres away rather than laying out our own fiber optic cable it is less expensive to actually lease these circuits to lease to fiber-optic cables of cable companies or telecom providers that have already laid out their own fiber-optic networks through the cities an alternative if we don't want to lease a fiber-optic link or if we want to have a redundant link is to have point-to-point connections through microwave antennas remember these will only be feasible if we have line of sight which means a straight line between one branch and another without any mountains or big forests in between these kind of links regardless if we use microwaves or if we use leased circuits from public providers are generally going to be expensive and sometimes rather than interconnecting ourselves directly through a private metropolitan area network we might use an internet-based tunnel or channel perhaps through a VPN tunnel that relies on the Internet as the way to communicate between one branch and another typical speeds for these kind of networks are going to range between the 64 kilobits and the 10 gigabits you might wonder why 64 kilobits which is a very very low data rate but this is the lowest data rate you can use to have a voice over IP conversation so sometimes you want to have a network just for voice communications and 64 kilobits is going to be more than necessary than what you need for this however these are less and less common and we might talk about links that have at least a few hundred megabytes of capacity extending the concepts of a metropolitan area network but to much larger scales and perhaps even international scales we talk about wide area networks wide area networks are going to be the private networks used to interconnect multiple operations across the globe for a single firm you can think of a South America and logistics provider that has multiple branches on different countries that firm will likely have a wide area network through which all the different firms and the different countries interconnect with each other so once again the concepts are actually very similar to those of our metropolitan area network particularly in the sense that we will quite likely be leasing our own links unless we have our own private satellite based network and the speeds of this network are going to again range between 64 kilobits and 10 gigabits per second to further ways of referring to networks you might have heard of our intranet and extranet these are nothing more than another way of classifying networks but now based on who can access them the names are fairly intuitive but let me elaborate briefly on them and Internet is a network accessible only by internal members of an organization so these are standard collaborators and for example everyone connecting in a local air network to the ERP system to their central information system is going to be connecting to it to what we would call an Internet so in general everyone connected to a local air network or even to our wide area network is going to be part of our intranet however physical presence on the premises of a firm is not necessarily needed to be able to connect to a firm's internet it is quite common that collaborators who work remotely be it working from home or on a business trip and at a hotel they might use a VPN a virtual private network to connect to the firm's intranet we will not however discuss what a VPN is in this video since that is more a security related topic we finally have extra nets which are networks designed to be accessible by people or entities external to an organization a very widely known example of a big extra net is how Walmart offers its suppliers access to its stock such that the suppliers themselves know when it's necessary for them to start shipping more goods into Walmart's warehouses they know this by connecting to Walmart's extranet a perhaps more common example is simply how we as end-users as customers go into a firms ecommerce website such as amazon.com or any other firm that offers us an online portal if you think about it the online portal is part of that firms enterprise systems where we have information on prices and stocks and we can place purchase orders so that ecommerce website could be categorized or classified as part of the firm's extranet we may also find connections not necessarily into systems but just into networks and the public Wi-Fi offered by a retail store for its customers could also be called an extranet and with that we conclude this video I am certain that many of you have many more questions about the different elements of IT infrastructure discussed in this video however recall that the scope of this video was to educate business executives and give them an overview of the different elements in an IT infrastructure rather than teaching executives how to administer that is the job of the system administrator this is high demand Ratana from Inc I and I thank you very much for your attention

Channel: German Retana

Views: 564,936

Keywords: INCAE, Data Networks, IT Infrastructure

Id: V6zJi8CU7Tk

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2016