Category: Weekly Post

Week 14 – Review and Test 2

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In our final week of class for IST 423, we began with chapter 14 in an effort to finish learning all material that will be on the exam this Friday. On Wednesday we had a review where Dr.Fusco essential just clicked through the review powerpoint and asked everyone if they had any questions. I did not find this to be a review, moreover it seemed an exclamation by professor to spite the few students who had not attended class for the majority of the semester. Friday is the exam and I am confident I will earn a score that will allow me to start my career next month on time. Thank you for giving this class your best effort this semester Dr. Fusco, there was many real-world examples that I appreciated.

https://www.konstantinfo.com/blog/why-multi-tenancy-application-architecture-matters/

Week 13 – Presentations

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This week, we had presented our Amazon Web Service case studies to professor Fusco and the class. The groups were broken down by twos on all three class days this week, with my group, Team 1, going on Friday.  My group selected the Benchling company’s case study because it sounded the most interesting. Benchling is a life sciences company that runs a database on their platform that is accessible by scientists across the globe in order to further their research. The powerpoints were around 10 to 20 minutes each and were all extremely interesting and helped broaden my knowledge of real world applications.

Here is an article I found that helped me understand Benchlings purpose when I was doing my research –

Benchling raises $14.5M to help streamline collaboration among scientists

Week 12 – Backup Agents and The Cloud

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This week we have been focused on learning the ins and outs of cloud computing. Businesses in todays world are taking full advantage of cloud computing technology to boost business functionality and progress. Cloud computing makes vendors and users have an easier experience of utilizing softwares, infrastructures and applications they may not have had the chance to before. Infrastructure-as-a-service, Platform-as-a-service, and Software-as-a-service are the three main models of cloud computing. All three have their role in creating ease to resources they may not have had before. Cloud computing has in some ways taken over society and is a main driver of many organizations today.

Here is this interesting web page I found that helps outline some backup options in todays world –

https://www.techsoup.org/support/articles-and-how-tos/backup-exec-agents-and-options

Week 11 – Backup and Archive

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The world is a volatile and dangerous place so in this week of class we learned about backup and archive. The lecture consisted of learning of numerous backup techniques, the reasoning behind backup and other backup topics such as: Disaster recovery, operational recovery, and archive. We also learned that unfortunately technology is not perfect and with certain hardware, crashes can be common.

https://www.bullguard.com/bullguard-security-center/pc-security/computer-threats/backup-of-data-files-why-it-is-important.aspx

This article from bullguard goes over some of the most common problems facing the protection and safety of your data and applies our learning from class.

Week – 9 and 10 Spring break and Business Continuity

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We had our spring break for week 9 of the class. When we got back we received our test grades and you can say I was less than pleased with the grade that I earned. Then we started week 10 which was Business Continuity. I enjoyed this chapter because it brought the previous topics we have learned about in the class into real world scenarios and this really helped me understand the bigger picture. Things like disaster recovery and potential lost revenue from clients were among the topics covered.

Here is an interesting article I read about outages and disaster recovery-

https://searchdisasterrecovery.techtarget.com/feature/Data-center-emergency-power-strategies-in-disaster-recovery-planning

 

Week 8 – Exam One

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This week in class we had our first exam of the course. On Monday, professor Fusco held a review session where he went through the review powerpoint as well as answer anymore in depth, hands-on questions the class was asking. The review session I found very helpful and made me slightly more comfortable with the overall difficult material. On Wednesday, we took the exam and I did not feel too good about it when I walked out of class that day. Friday was an optional class session where professor Fusco did a Docker lab with us for extra credit.

To review for the exam I went through this article going over the OSI model in more depth:

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3239677/the-osi-model-explained-how-to-understand-and-remember-the-7-layer-network-model.html

Week 7 – THON/Snow-Day

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Week seven was a very short week due to the cancellation of Monday’s class by Professor Fusco as well as the universities cancellation of classes of Wednesday due to a winter storm. In class Friday however, we started a lab in AWS that involved using Docker. Docker involved a new form of virtualization called containerization, I have never worked with AWS prior to this class so all of these concepts were new to me. During the lab we built a LAMP stack onto a previous lab we did in class that was very complicated and had numerous steps. Just to expand my knowledge of Docker a little bit I read this article that I will post the link of to below.

https://towardsdatascience.com/learn-enough-docker-to-be-useful-b7ba70caeb4b

 

Week 6 – Fiber Channel Storage Area Networks

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Week 6 in IST 423 had a very broad range of topics from an intro to drivers for IP SAN and began learning Fiber Channel Storage Area Networks and related concepts of this module like block-level storage virtualization and EMC Connectrix. We Then went over topics such as iSCSI and gateways. At an internship of mine two summers ago I helped some of the IT officers with data duplication and a modern data infrastructure so this lecture was one that really clicked for me.

Some additional reading I did on Fiber Channel SAN –

https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/The-anatomy-of-a-SAN-Fibre-Channel-SAN-explained

While doing my reading and skimming I also found this recent article –

https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-centers/sinking-fibre-channel-san

 

WEEK 5 – RAID and Storage Systems

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During our fifth week of class we continued to talk about RAID as well as started delving into intelligent storage systems. The four parts of an intelligent system as we learned, are: the front end components, cache, back end components, and physical disks. In addition to learning about the Intelligent storage systems, we learned Logical unit number (LUN). We have now added a LUN into our system which has made it even more complex. We also reviewed the answers to mini case 1 and thanks to this review I feel that I now have a pretty good understanding of RAID.

This article cleared up a couple of the questions I had on LUN and why it exists.-

https://www.computerweekly.com/answer/What-is-a-LUN-and-why-do-we-need-storage-LUNs

 

Week 4 – LAMP and Virtualization

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Even though this week was brief, it was plentiful in objectives to accomplish. In class we started learning about data centers work and how virtualization plays a key role in them. At the end of the week we added to our LAMP stack, we started an instance and continued following each step. Additionally, we discussed RAID and its use cases in the industry that RAID would be used for. Before I came to the lecture, I thought of RAID as just arrays of supersized external hard drives, I know now they are a tool that protects data. Below I included a short Youtube video that simplifies the concept into the essentials.