IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies

Editor's Notes

• #5: A good parallel is the infrastructure of a building which would include the electrical and plumbing systems, along with a telephone network. You are familiar with these types of infrastructure. Like these other kinds of infrastructure, IT infrastructure may not be visible to the casual employee, but it plays a vital role in the life of the business. Without it, there would be no business.
• #6: A firm’s IT infrastructure is composed of hardware, software, data management technology, networking technology, and technology services.
• #11: Most students do not think of their cell phones as computers. Yet cell phones have powerful, energy-efficient processor chips that use very little power, an operating system, and application software (including games). Of course smartphones like iPhone, Samsung, and others truly are computer systems that also are telephones and media devices. Today’s smartphones are far more powerful than the early PCs of the 1980s. The more appropriate term for smartphones is “media and entertainment devices” as Steve Jobs often referred to the iPhone and iPad. Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files.
• #12: You may want to spend some time explaining carefully client/server computing because it is the dominant model of computing and has been since the 1990s. The web is a very large example of client/server computing. The client/server model of computing is based on inexpensive PC microprocessors. Server architecture allows data centers to scale up as need by simply adding more servers (or increasing the processing power of existing servers by moving to dual and quad core processors). Clients are the interface between system and user.
• #13: In client/server computing, computer processing is split between client machines and server machines linked by a network. Users interface with the client machines. A server is a physical computer. It’s also the software that runs on that computer which “serves” user requests. The intended meaning often comes from the context in which it is used. If someone says we had to “purchase a number of servers,” it usually means the purchase of computers. When people say “the server is down” they usually mean the computer is down. However, a web page server is also a piece of software that serves up content to users on request.
• #14: In a multitiered client/server network, client requests for service are handled by different levels of servers. Corporations and even small firms usually separate the application processing (usually a database application) from the web page server function. Although not necessarily on different physical servers, often this separation does involve a separate physical server for applications.
• #15: The cost of digital storage has fallen exponentially along with the cost of computing. Today, an 32 gigabyte USB “Flash Drive” costs about $12. You might ask students what impact they think this might have on the amount of digital information stored in corporations. Or ask students how many gigabytes of information they use to store photos, music, videos, podcasts, and other digital material. On average in 2015, Americans consumed an estimated 35 gigabytes of digital information a day. Ask students if they can imagine themselves consuming that much digital information. Ask them to help you make a list of the digital information sources they use in a day. Try to estimate how large are the files they routinely use for music, video, advertising, browsing the web and using search engines. The biggest digital files are video files. Ask if students can think of other ways information gets into computers. How about cell phone cameras?
• #16: BYOD Bring your own device Talk to students about how they are using their cell phones. Are they listening to online radio stations, streaming music and videos, or mostly just texting? Do they shop, and do some buy? What do they buy– digital goods or retail goods like at Amazon? How use apps to purchase? Ask them to think about how this new mobile platform might influence how a business is run, or how it is managed. Quantum physics, or quantum mechanics, studies the behavior of physical matter at microscopic scales, in which energy and matter behave as both waves and particles. There are virtual machines that are software “machines” that act as if they were a real physical computer (executes instructions like the physical machine it emulates). IBM’s mainframes run tens of thousands of separate instances of Windows or Linux on a single large mainframe computer, giving users the impression they have their own dedicated computer. Server computers can be virtualized to run multiple instances of an operating system also giving users the feeling they have their own computer. Virtualized computers are much more efficient than a typical non-virtualized computer because they can be executing multiple jobs nearly simultaneously. Virtual memory is memory which fools the processor into thinking it is hardware memory but in fact is memory located on a hard drive.
• #18: In cloud computing, hardware and software capabilities are a pool of virtualized resources provided over a network, often the Internet. Businesses and employees have access to applications and IT infrastructure anywhere and at any time. The largest operators of cloud computing data centers are Amazon, IBM, Oracle, HP, Apple, and Google.
• #19: Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of web services that Amazon provides to users of its cloud platform. AWS now offers over 90 services and is the largest provider of public cloud-based services. The largest operators of cloud computing data centers are Amazon, IBM, Oracle, HP, Apple, and Google.
• #20: Both grid computing and cloud computing allow organizations to optimize their use of resources in new ways. Grid computing allow corporations to take advantage of spare computing power in the form of networked virtual supercomputers, and cloud computing allows organizations to avoid the expenses of maintaining their own hardware and software, relying on public and private cloud computers.
• #21: Smartphones do not have fans, but heat sinks to dissipate the processor heat to the frame of the phone. According to a study by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), all data centers in the US consume 91 billion kilowatt hours a year in 2014, about 34 power plants putting out 500 megawatts each. Large mega-sized cloud centers consume only 5% of this load, and are the most efficient forms of computing. The problem is the 95% of smaller data centers that are very inefficient. Multicore processors are the major way computer manufacturers today can increase speed and power. When all processing is done by a single chip, power leakage and heat increase as processor speed is increased. These limitations are avoided by spreading the load across two or more processors operating at slower speeds but which together can get the job done faster than a single high speed chip.
• #23: why a Microsoft application like Word cannot be installed on both PCs and Macintosh computer? Why is it that users are forced to buy different software application software for different devices? A part of the answer is the close interdependency of hardware, operating systems, and application software.
• #24: PC operating systems create the user interface, like Windows or Macintosh OS. This interface has evolved from a text command interface to a mouse-based graphical user interface to current touch screen interfaces found on some PCs and smartphones. Most students do not know their cell phone has an operating system. On the blackboard, make a list of the “resources” that a cell phone or smartphone has to manage. Managing these resources is one function of the operating system, along with creating the use interface.
• #25: Java, and the Java Virtual Machine, is ubiquitous across the web. It is useful because it allows developers to write an application once in Java, and then be assured it will work on any Java-enabled machine.
• #26: Although Microsoft Office applications are found on more than 80 percent of the world’s billion computers, the news in this area is the growth of open source and free desktop applications. Although online on demand apps like Google Apps, and OpenOffice, are growing in market acceptance, most users continue to buy Microsoft software. Why do students think this is the case?
• #27: Spreadsheet software organizes data into columns and rows for analysis and manipulation. Contemporary spreadsheet software provides graphing abilities for a clear, visual representation of the data in the spreadsheets. This sample breakeven analysis is represented as numbers in a spreadsheet as well as a line graph for easy interpretation. Ask how many students use spreadsheets on a regular, daily basis? How many have never used spreadsheet software? Ask the users to describe how they use the software, what kinds of reports have they produced? What are the advantages of this software when compared to older methods—like calculating things by hand? What are the drawbacks of this software that they have personally witnessed?
• #28: Many students probably do not know that you can see the HTML code of any web page by the View/Page Source menu in Mozilla Firefox.
• #29: Web services is an approach to building enterprise applications. Web services is a “messaging system” which allows diverse computing applications in a firm to communicate data with one another without extensive integration of the constituent applications (which tends to be very expensive). In a service-oriented architecture, various applications provide “services” (data) on request to other applications needing data. SOA is a major alternative to installing large scale enterprise systems. Emphasize that SOA is a method of developing infrastructure using web services with an eye toward creating applications that draw data from several underlying (usually older programs). All programs are built or redesigned to provide certain information (services) to all other programs. With SOA, developers incorporate each individual service into an application that successfully meets the needs of the organization.
• #30: Dollar Rent-A-Car uses web services to provide a standard intermediate layer of software to talk to other companies’ information systems. Dollar Rent-A-Car can use this set of web services to link to other companies’ information systems without having to build a separate link to each firm’s systems. Dollar Rent-a-Car is an excellent example of how computer applications, some owned by different firms, can work together to provide a single environment for customers and users.
• #31: Ask students to help you put together a list of really interesting software apps they have discovered or used in the last few months. Apple and Android have about 1.5 million apps each, a total of 3 million apps exist. How many apps do students have on their phones? The average is about 23 apps per phone. The top ten apps account for 90% of the usage. Facebook alone accounts for 50% of user smartphone time.