Product Review

IT infrastructure has been the foundation that enabled successful application deployments for many decades. Yet, general and up to date infrastructure knowledge is not widespread. Experience shows that software developers, system administrators, and project managers often have little knowledge of the big influence IT infrastructure has on performance, availability and security of software applications.
This book explains the concepts, history, and implementation of IT infrastructures. Although many of books can be found on each individual infrastructure building block, this is the first book to describe all of them: datacenters, servers, networks, storage, operating systems, and end user devices.
The building blocks described in this book provide functionality, but they also provide the non-functional attributes performance, availability, and security. These attributes are explained on a conceptual level in separate chapters, and more specific in the chapters about each individual building block.
Whether you need an introduction to infrastructure technologies, a refresher course, or a study guide for a computer science class, you will find that the presented building blocks and concepts provide a solid foundation for understanding the complexity of today’s IT infrastructures.
This book can be used as a study book – it is used by a number of universities in the USA, as part of their IT architecture courses, based on the IS 2010.4 curriculum.