An Introduction to the IT Infrastructure
The organizations of today’s world are null without the association of Information Technology (IT). Every organization implements its information and communication setup for the smooth functioning of the work. Unfortunately, most of these companies fail to install the right IT infrastructure for achieving the actual returns. That means many companies do procure more machines such as servers, PCs, or other IT hardware without proper planning and sufficient reasons. It causes an unnecessary financial burden to the company’s annual expenditure as well as accommodating excess or avoidable hardware in the company due to which always there is a possibility of power wastage and space consumption. Proper planning before the installation of IT hardware ensures many advantages to both the companies and the environment, thereby it saves the extra financial loss to the company.
Server Installation: Existing Flaws
The IT infrastructure setup of a company, generally it is seen, is the combination of hardware and software. Since the inception of IT, most of the companies have made it as a part of them, but struggle to maintain its functioning due to continuous technology change. Lack of adequate knowledge of installation of servers cost them huge sums of the company’s funds that would have been converted into profit later. The main factors to be kept in mind while setting up the Server infrastructure are:
- Minimize the cost of IT infrastructure by efficiently applying the resources.
- ‘Business needs’ never be compromised while designing projects.
- Special concentration needs to be given for the consistency and predictability of the functions.
- Design a project or a working environment, which continuously consolidates workload so that maximum server utilization is achieved with minimum resources, thereby, reduces the operational charges.
Nowadays the IT infrastructure companies take initiatives with their maximum efforts to get rid of the possible errors and complexity, which may normally occur during the infrastructure design. The transformation from stand-alone PCs to thin-client multi-tier environments has changed the world’s IT scenario to a large extent. Now organizations always seek guidance and advice from the specialist of relevant subjects before initiating any work related to IT, whether it is software, hardware, or security matters. This systematic process is also applied in server installations. The IT firms gifted the world with continuously advancing and updating Windows Servers. Unix systems are also popular for good consistency and reliability. It is also best known for IT security as intruders seldom attack Unix systems. In the last ten years, it has been noticed the rapid growth in the usage of open sources technologies like the Linux Operating System. These innovations in the IT world caused an increase in server counts across the world. Several kinds of servers constituted various networking concepts like Local Area Network, Wide Area Network, Wireless LAN, Internet, Virtual Private Network, Storage Area Network, Remote Video Conferencing, and Telepresence, etc. This resulted in the development of network complexity across the world. Several policies and techniques were introduced to streamline the irregularities being faced in IT-based organizations. A couple of normally seen symptoms related to IT companies are:
- “Large numbers of underutilized “one-application per box” x86-based servers.
- Pervasive over-provisioning caused by policies that size all servers for “worst-case” workload scenarios” (VMware).
Apart from the above, there are several important challenges are faced by the IT world, which requires quick resolution. One of them is the slow response time from the submission of change requests to the operational changes. Secondly, the increased provisioning cycle duration for installation and operation of newly inducting servers, storage, and networking systems. The next is related to the maintenance activities of the windows operating system. It is already getting over-subscribed. Owing to not formulating proper policies or failing in updating and enforcing the existing policies are causing installation of inconsistent and non-reproducible servers. The organizations seldom keep relevant information about the number of equipment, working status, and its ownership. They often maintain multiple server management systems concerning the different Operating system servers such as Windows, Novel, Unix, and Linux servers.
Challenges: How to face it?
Now independent server concept is transformed into a virtualization concept. As per a recent study, it is revealed that the advent of virtualization software method reduced the organizations’ total cost of ownership (TCO) for servers by 74% in server environments and provides an approximate return on investment (ROI) of more than 300% within a period of initial six months. There are several other benefits availed by the organizations after virtualization are:
- Identifying the idle resources, redeploying these on new projects ensures proper utilization of available servers. This reduces the working cost of servers.
- The efficiency of IT services increased.
- Incorporating the new services becomes easy and fast.
- Technical, Training and Maintenance cost becomes cheap.
- “Increasing disaster recovery capabilities, including decreasing recovery time on existing non-high availability services.
- Building cost-effective and consistent development and test environments.” (VMware).
Nowadays the vision of IT service providers is to ensure effective services to their clients by bestowing upon a reliable and best quality service level infrastructure for very nominal charges. With the continuous efforts of the IT specialists, the concept of storage area networking spread across the business world and a maximum number of reputed companies utilize the concept that is flexible, comparatively cheap and provides the best service level storage environment. Such modified category by combining the processes like computing, networking, and storage is called virtual infrastructure. For example, VMware infrastructure is a combination of x86 servers with their processors, other functions like memory management, risk management, networking technology. System resources such as OS and application software are automatically allocated to separate virtual machines based on requirement and priority basis. This way virtual infrastructure manages and utilizes server resources in the best possible way.
Conclusion
Considering the aspects like flexibility and easy management, cutting the installation and maintenance cost, and making the environment friendly, the technology-savvy IT specialists developed the virtual infrastructure environment from independent server technology. As this system gained popularity, with regards to its power-saving and effective utilization of server resources, organizations across the world tend to switch over from conventional standalone server systems to virtual ones. This transformation into virtual infrastructure technology reduces national power consumption by reducing its numbers. It is a boon for the world by saving energy for the future.
Work cited
VMware, Inc. “Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Infrastructure.” Web.