Datacenter Infrastructure

Course details

Worldwide datacenters host powerful IT-based applications, which we all use everyday of our life, a popular example being "gmail".

Along with the complexity of working with servers /equipment in a datacenter and managing a large data center, we have to deal with tons of services and protocols on a daily basis to exchange information of all sorts like Active Directory, Exchange Email Servers, Web Servers and other infrastructure including a complex domain of Networking.

Combined with the economic benefits of consolidation of physical assets and virtualization, it has led to an unprecedented expansion of data centers in both size and density, making it a further complicated discipline to understand and scope.

This course explores the basics of many of these services, protocols, software used to manage Virtualization & Clustering, interdependence of these services, storage and basics of networking.

Who Should Take This Course:

Every IT professional (Engineers, Developers, Testers, Systems or Database Administrators, Managers and Senior Heads ) needs to understand the various components of a datacenter and how they interoperate. Anybody who wants to enhance his knowledge or bridge the gaps in his existing knowledge, should consider joining this course.

If you have heard lot of jargons in the IT world like DNS, SNMP, DHCP, AD, layer 2 or 3 switches, routers, clustering, vmware, citrix, configuration management, version control, basics of networking like why do we need a netmask and don't understand what they mean, then this course is a must for you. We also talk about other infrastructure components and their need like firewalls, IDS, Spam filters, load balancers, DMZ zones etc and how they work.

Along with all of the above you will also learn many other topics related to hosting servers, infrastructure in a datacenter and issues with managing a datacenter. We shall also explore how the datacenter design and setup changes between different industry verticals like from manufacturing to banking to telco.

This is a lively discussion based brain storming workshop and doesn't have any practicals hands-on. It is more to understand all these concepts and clarify doubts on these.

Course Content:

• Hardware Architectures and Comparison & OS they support - SPARC, PowerPC, Intel, Motorolla, ARM, Zilog
• 32bit Vs 64 bit Architecture
• Different Server types - Blades / 1U, 2U, 4U / - Various vendors in market for servers
• Server core capacity & memory capacity
• Capacity sizing of the above servers - HDD's , network ports, console
• DC details - Rack details, cabling, cooling, power req
• Storage types - SAN Vs NAS - Different vendors in market for these.
• Network equipment - Introduction to capabilities of Routers / Hubs / Switches / Firewalls / IDS / Load balancers
• Basic networking concepts - CIDR Vs Class based, subnetting, Network topologies
• Networking media - Coax, Fibre, Ethernet - 10/100/1G
• Hard disk comparison - SATA , Fibre, SCSI, iSCSI, SSD
• Services & Protocols and their need - Introduction to DNS, DHCP, AD, LDAP, SSH, UDP, TCP, Telnet, NTP, FTP, Sftp, SNMP, SMTP, Print servers/queues, VOIP
• Clustering & Redundancy concepts - How is redundancy and BCP planned for Network, Server hardware, Services, Applications, Database
• Mass Deployment technologies - Applications and Servers can be mass deployed. A discussion on how this is done.
• Communication Technologies - 3G, Broadband, Satellite, Cabled, Bluetooth, Infrared, GPS
• Popular s/w used and its need - Citrix, Virtualization - Vmware etc, Clearcase, Monitoring, Cloud computing ever before.