 | What is this site about? This site is an attempt to establish a list of fundamentals of computer and network infrastructure management, as well as practical tools for auditing and assessing your own infrastructure against these fundamentals. These fundamentals are practical measures to work towards, derived from common sense business goals. |
Why is this site needed?
I am employed as a System Administrator in a medium sized private company. My job is to install, maintain and support software and hardware server and network systems for the business. I have no trouble finding training material and certifications on specific technologies, platforms and products from vendors, or finding best practices on theoretical infrastructure management practices (through, for example. the Information Technology Infrastructure Library). I do however find there is a scarcity of offerings covering everything else in the middle - shared knowledge on how you should use those specific products in the most mature ways to achieve business goals such as reliability and uptime. I have termed this fundamental infrastructure management.
By this I mean that there are thousands of system administrators who are comfortable administering a DNS server using bind, or a mail server using Exim,
but have never been exposed to best practices relating to the IT
infrastructure in which the DNS and mail servers live, in areas such as
server monitoring and data backup. Perhaps because system
administration is a relatively young profession, or perhaps because it
is a technology-based profession where different jobs use widely
different technologies, there is a relative scarcity of openly
available advice on best practices for managing an IT infrastructure in
a form that is at once generic enough to be applicable to all, whilst
being specific enough to be relevant to hands-on system administrators
in their day to day duties.
News and Updates:
Mon 5 April, 2010 - Site registered and published
