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I tend to see a lot of IT professionals on these forums, so I thought i'd try and seek help here.
Basically, i'm stumped on my uni assignment. I've had flu and I missed the relevant lecture and the lecture slides are not making sense to me. I've been trawling the internet but the terms 'infrastructure' and 'architecture' are used in so many disciplines i'm struggling to find what I need. Obviously I don't want the work done for me but can someone tell me what I should be looking for? I can't find any 'types' of network infrastructure.
Heres the scenario-
You are a newly appointed IT manager of a growing building merchant. The business is both a wholesaler and retailer in that they sell from their warehouse to the trade and through a chain of local shops to the public. Although the turnover is £20 million a year, each of the stores and the warehouse have their own stock control system. The shops have a manual system. The warehouses have a computerised system for stock control.
And i'm stumped by these two questions (more by C than D).
c) What type of infrastructure would be appropriate for the shops?
d) What type of network infrastructure could be used to bring all these different outlets together and what were the consequences.
For C, should I be talking about distributed systems, mainframes etc.? Or should I be talking about client-server architecture etc? Or something else entirely?
Examples of these 'types' i've been unable to find would be great.
Please help :).
Alexander
If I might take a stab at this:
You have a network that is computerized at the hub (center warehouse), but manual at the endpoints (local shops). You want the endpoints to start using computers. Client-server might work, but only if the local shops each write their own inventory program (unlikely, given that they are manual). A relational database that gives the shops their own access to the db for updates would be ideal in that case.
If you "force" the shops together on a centralized database (mainframe), the shops are only going to update fields on the db they are interested in, not the warehouse. Like quantity vs. price.
Cloud-based computing: not needed here, as the stores are stationary, not mobile. It's a business, so you want security.
Architecture might be Virtual Private Network, aka "VPN". This is like https SSL on the web to securely access ("tunnel") the db, something you want on a business system. Or you could go Secure Socket Layer via the Web to a relational database. You're going for stock control, not replacing the brick-and-mortar stores, however, so no shopping cart. So a real-time inventory program is the goal.
This is going to require training time at the shops, which may require them to purchase a computer, Internet connection, and hire a person who understands it all. Does hiring the person(s) justify the lowered warehouse costs for just-in-time warehousing?
I'd start out with the warehouse shipping a specific printout with each shipment that the store owner would confirm by database, then move on to tracking "shelf time" as well as sales.
Boy oh boy. As an IT infrastructure practitioner for several decades, I could help some with real world scenarios, but academic questions like this are often looking for very specific answers.
The sites I've worked generally put server, client, and network hardware into the infrastructure box, along with storage, backup, recovery (or continuity), platform and network security, facilities (rooms, power, etc), monitoring and alerts, and hardware design (sometimes databases and middleware). Selection of specific infrastructure is based upon the site or application itself, its design and requirements, and its criticality to the organization.
Without having background info on the class, I can't really tell you where to begin. I could write a paper on those questions, and it still might not be what the prof is looking for. Anybody from your class who can give you a hand with what the expectations might be?
This is all useful, but what 'type' of infrastructure does it come under? I'm still not sure what the 'types' of infrastructure are.
Is it things like client-server? I thought that was architecture (confusingly these terms seeem to be different but my lecture only focuses on architecture)
Exactly, client-server is a type of application architecture, and it is NOT infrastructure to my mind.
Would whether the company uses a mainframe environment or distributed or virtualised environment be a type if infastructure? It really is this 'type' of infastructure thats throwing me the most...
Me too. The prof could be considering "mainframe, distributed, standalone" as types of infrastructure, but that's kinda silly.
Frankly it's a terrible question and your answer will have to make a ton of assumptions, but I think jhpace1 probably has the right idea there.
Given all the different factors which could influence your decision, I don't think your instructor is looking for a specific answer as much as he's looking at how logically you step through answering the question.
You have more faith in instructors than I do. :)
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This is the final year of my university degree. I study IT in Organisations at the university of southampton in the UK.
The only time infrastructure is really mentioned in the relevant slides is here-
Information Architecture and Infrastructure
#Architecture is a high-level map of the information requirements in organisation
#Infrastructure relates to the physical facilities, the services and management that supports all commuter resources within an organisation
-Mainframe Environment. PC Environment. Distributed Environment
I'm unsure if mainframe environment, PC environment and distributed environment are meant to be the types of infrastructure, as they came hyphonated underneath the Infastructue bullet point.
The rest of the slides talk about client/server architecture, enterpriese-wide client server arch.
Then talks about strategic information management.
Then onto e-commerce and e-business.
#Infrastructure relates to the physical facilities, the services and management that supports all commuter resources within an organisation
-Mainframe Environment. PC Environment. Distributed Environment
I think this is the key. I haven't seen the actual slide, but from this I'd say that for the purposes of this course, the three infrastructure 'types' are Mainframe Environment, PC Environment, Distributed Environment
And i'm stumped by these two questions (more by C than D).c) What type of infrastructure would be appropriate for the shops?
d) What type of network infrastructure could be used to bring all these different outlets together and what were the consequences.
Using the presumption above, I'd say that the answer to c) is 'PC environment' (since each shop currently has a manual system, and there is an implication that the shops really aren't part of the warehouse-to-store system...also part c. refers to a 'system', but not a 'network system', and PC Environment is the only one that really fits that bill)
d) would then become a matter of deciding whether bringing all of the elements together can best be done via a Mainframe Environment or a Distributed Environment and then defending your choice and showing consequences.
