Hardware, Software and Network Infrastructure Design

Information Technology Infrastructure is the foundation upon which a business bases its IT operations. The choice and combination of hardware, software and network infrastructure can have a profound influence on the evolution of a company's information systems. IT infrastructure relates to selection of the following:

• Network Media — which represents the communications media such as fibre, twisted pair or wireless and the media access control technology used such as Ethernet, line drivers, line-of-sight transceivers, or microwave transmitters used to link departments and branch offices to the corporate IT network.
• Hardware — which includes:
  1. server hardware, or architecture — for example, S/390, AS/400, RS6000, Sun, SGI, HP, Compaq, PowerPC, Alpha, Intel Pentium (IA32), and Intel Itanium (IA64).
  2. network infrastructure hardware — for example, network hubs, switches, interface cards, firewalls, routers and bridges.
  3. client hardware type such as PC, Macintosh and Thin Client.
  4. data storage, and backup equipment — for example, disk arrays and backup solutions.
• Network Protocol — which represents the communications protocols such as TCP/IP to enable computers throughout the network to communicate. Although, more recently, TCP/IP has become the standard network protocol of choice, certain complications are introduced where legacy applications and hardware need to be supported by and integrated into the network infrastructure. For example, older MS-DOS (or Windows 3.11) based clients may need to run, or provide certain services over NetBEUI; Apple Macintosh computers require AppleTalk to share certain resources.
• Computing Environments — which includes the choice of:
  1. Operating System — for example: MVS, OS/400, Unix, Windows NT/2000, and Linux.
  2. Server Applications — for example: database servers such as SQL Server, DB2, Oracle; backup or hierarchical storage software; security and public key infrastructure applications.
  3. Middleware — for example: database access components such as EDA, Shadow Direct, ADO, and Client Access.
• Application Software — which includes the choice of:
  1. Server Applications — mail servers such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, Sendmail, QMail; and web application servers such as Microsoft IIS, Lotus Notes, Apache.
  2. Client Applications — accounting packages; office productivity packages such as Microsoft Office, Corel Office, Lotus Smartsuite and Sun StarOffice; web browsers such as Netscape 6, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

In some cases, parts of a company's IT infrastructure will be dictated by external factors. For example, a certain software package is only available for IBM iSeries equipment (formerly AS/400) running OS/400, or where Microsoft Office running on Windows is the de-facto standard for Office productivity software.

However, in other cases, the selection of appropriate hardware, software and network infrastructure is less straight forward and choices made today may have a significant impact on the ability for the company to develop their IT-systems to support future requirements.

We provide independent consultancy to help you to select the most appropriate IT infrastructure solutions for your business from both available and forthcoming technologies, within the constraints of your budget.