I was asked to create an infographics about Server Management. What I included in the content are its function, processing components, how to manage servers, server design and its strategic nature. Server runs the applications and databases. Its components to process transactions are the CPU, memory and disk. Their specifications are defined during acquisition of servers and will determine the server’s processing capability. Their utilization are monitored using capacity management tools to check if there will be spikes resulting from high volume of transactions coming in the server. Managing servers is more than configuration of its technical anatomy. It may involve designing its technical architecture, monitoring its availability and capacity. Inventory of server is very important including the number of physical machines and specification. Deployment and any changes in server’s current state are sensitive processes especially if its running in the production since it may impact the front-end users and other services.

The server design has changed over the years. It seems that the megalithic IBM mainframes are still popular today especially on giant multi-national companies. This was followed by client-server design where-in web, application and databases are installed in separate servers. The most recent is virtual machines or clustered servers. This allows installation of various applications in a single server through virtual allocation of disks. But this may not be applicable for databases especially for huge data.

Lastly, designing the whole server infrastructure is strategic in nature. There’s a large investment on servers and its design must last for at least 3 to 5 years. Also the challenges of servers is how to adopt on ever changing technology and that they are subject to upgrade in operating system, database and even the application it runs.

Technicalities:

The name of the pharaoh is Akhenaten. Creating him is very challenging which took me  5 hours. The image of pharaohs are majestic and strong. I also refrained of using dotted doodle eyes instead I adapted the Egyptian’s hieroglyphic style. After I finished his image I suppose I was mesmerized by my own vector – sort of vectorized.

As for the servers, I did not used 3D effects but rather the manual 3D drafting. Using 3D effects often makes the file heavy. Conceptualizing the crane as an icon for deployment is also challenging because I do not know which crane to use.