Although data processing is peculiar to each field of business, in every case it must rest on a technical infrastructure that is common to most business environments. This book explains how to design, build, and manage precisely that infrastructure, starting from the simplest cases of small or home offices and quickly expanding to cover office buildings spanning several floors and accommodating hundreds of information technology (IT) devices.

The first chapter introduces the duties of system administrators (or SysAdmin as they are affectionately referred to in IT slang) from the most mundane, such as taking care of the smooth day-to-day functioning of every device, to the most far-reaching in scope and time, such as keeping current on new developments in the field and planning to accommodate them into the system they are in charge of, to the most personal, such as training and supervising an IT staff.

The second chapter deals with home or small office networks--although small in size and scope, the fundamental concepts of IT infrastructure management are already present, notably security, back-ups, and archiving.

From chapter 3 onwards, all aspects of large infrastructure management are covered one by one: from physical environment considerations (power supply, cooling, fire suppression, and the like) to network structure design, with extensive reference to the underlying conceptual models, both open systems interconnection (OSI) and transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP), and operational support considerations in order to give users the best possible service; from provisioning strategies for servers, both hardware and virtual ones, to considerations about data storage; from considerations about user access, both from inside the network as well as from outside, to device deployment strategies; and from device protection from viruses and malware to disaster recovery. All these topics configure a large-scale scenario, one in which single problems may be trivial, but the sheer number of them can spell tough consequences.

For these reasons, the IT professionals this book targets are neither entry level nor accidental; on the contrary, they must have already seen their share of complex systems and associated headaches. In any case, this book will really help them, for it is written in a plain, readily understandable style with plenty of figures, diagrams, and reference notes on the same page. It conveys the complexity of problems a large IT infrastructure poses, but also teaches readers how to come to terms with them. It is a book every SysAdmin should have readily at hand, both as a complete description of an IT infrastructure and as a quick reference to browse.

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