Starting point for someone looking to build a broad understanding of IT infrastructure

Beren

Beren

Beren

Soldato
Joined
30 Jul 2004
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Location
Auckland
I need to rapidly increase my fundamental technical understanding of IT.

Specifically around Server, Storage, Network Infrastructure - Hypervisor, MS Server and Workstation OS and application stacks.

I am going to be wandering down the wiki route - but would really appreciate any good information sources.
 
COMPTIA A+ & Network+

That should see you well.

Plenty of books and material available if you know where to look.
 
Microsoft do YouTube videos on their products where they give a pretty technical introduction into what their software does and how to apply it.
I think they are aimed at the system planner market.

Too many of the books on the topic are just rehashed lists of what each button does, great if you are the monkey keeping it running but naff all use if you are looking at how to integrate.
 
How broad is the scope you need to encompass? Are you being asked to implement a shared cloud infrastructure, or do you just need to understand it from a high level overview?
 
There is an outside possibility that I am being considered in a Service Delivery role selling outsourced infrastructure engineering time.

So what I need to be able to develop is a much stronger understanding of the implications of projects - what grade of engineer I am going to be looking at and what key skill sets I am going to need to be aware of.

I will typically get a lot of this in a massive crash course by meeting all the engineers finding out what they do and the projects they have worked in what went well badly etc - but I actually care about knowing what I am talking about so want to start doing more than that.
 
Build yourself a virtual network, then get stuck in learning what you need to make it work.
 
You could start with learning the difference between server and PC's hardware/software.

Some topics.

Server Hardware, Raid and all the Raid variations, ECC Memory, Dual PSUs, UPS, tape/usb backup.
OS's - Linux and Windows - Know all the variations.
Redundancy.
IP addressing.
DNS/DHCP.
Microsoft Exchange.
Security - including, Hardware firewall, switches, server configurations.
Scripting.
Active directory
Backup.
Virtualisation.

A lot of stuff to learn. You have your work cut out. There is a course called server+ then you have all the Cisco sources and Microsoft certification courses.
 
Beren said:
There is an outside possibility that I am being considered in a Service Delivery role selling outsourced infrastructure engineering time.

So what I need to be able to develop is a much stronger understanding of the implications of projects - what grade of engineer I am going to be looking at and what key skill sets I am going to need to be aware of.

I will typically get a lot of this in a massive crash course by meeting all the engineers finding out what they do and the projects they have worked in what went well badly etc - but I actually care about knowing what I am talking about so want to start doing more than that.
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What resources will you have available to you? From the role as you describe it just doing technical courses is probably a waste of time as you won't be implementing anything yourself. Normally I would expect a solution architect to be designing new systems for Customers backing up Sale and Service Delivery / Bid managers and have more detailed knowledge but the latter groups have a more general overview.

What you should be doing is looking over the white papers and reference architectures which are put out by each vendor which will give a high level overview of what their products do and how they hang together in an enterprise infrastructure. You can then compare these with what you are selling and look at what resource skills you would require in each situation.
 
Thanks for the advice - The white paper suggestion is a great idea, I have been keeping a bit of an eye on those over the last year anyway but will have a slightly more detailed look moving forward.
 
What helped me a lot in my career is getting hands on. Download VMware Player/Virtualbox or your chosen VM software and install MS Server software, follow on line guides and just get a feel for the software
 
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