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 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 part of IT architecture courses based on the IS 2010.4 curriculum.

For many decades, IT infrastructure has provided the foundation for successful application deployment. Yet, general knowledge of infrastructures is still not widespread. Experience shows that software developers, system administrators, and project managers often have little knowledge of the big influence IT infrastructures have on the 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 individual infrastructure building blocks, this is the first book to describe all of them: datacenters, servers, networks, storage, virtualization, operating systems, and end user devices. 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.