Titan IT Infrastructure Model

 

The Titan IT infrastructure diagram model shows the infrastructure itself and the “users” of the infrastructure. These users are:

•  Middleware and Databases

•  Applications

•  Processes and information

• Datacenters – Typically IT hardware is located in a datacenter. Datacenters provide (uninterruptible) power supply, cooling, computer racks, and availability and security measures.

• Servers - Servers are the physical main processing units – also known as computers, located in the datacenter.

• Networking - The network is a very important building block of any infrastructure. The networking building block includes routers, switches, firewalls, WAN (wide area network), LAN, dial-in, Internet access, and VPNs (Virtual Private Network), and (on the network application level) relatively simple services like DNS, DHCP, and time services, necessary for the infrastructure to work.

• Storage - Servers can have internal storage like hard disks, but they can also use external storage. The storage building block contains hard disks, tapes, Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), and Storage Area Networks (SANs).

•  Virtualization - Virtualization acts as an abstraction layer between the operating system and the server hardware. Virtualization enables a physical machine to run multiple operating systems.

• Operating systems - An operating system is a collection of programs that manage a computer’s internal workings: its memory, processors, devices, and file system.

• End User Devices - The devices used by end users to work with applications, including PCs, laptops, thin clients, mobile devices, and printers. Vertically, three essential non-functional attributes are shown:

• Availability - Availability contains areas like backup, restore, disaster recovery, failover, high availability clustering, and replication.

• Performance - The performance of an IT infrastructure consists of areas like scaling, virtualization, caching, load balancing, Quality of Service (QoS), and high performance clusters.

• Security - Infrastructure security implements solutions like VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), IDSs (Intruder Detection Systems), access control, encryption, etc. These non-functional attributes are affected by the configuration of each and every one of the infrastructure components. Although many other non-functional attributes can be defined, these three are almost always the essential ones in IT infrastructure architectures.