2 September 2010

The Difference Between Network and Server Engineers – Pictorial

I have been planning cloud computing systems recently, and had many long discussions with different teams. I have prepared the following diagram to show the perceptual difference between how each team perceives the data centre.

Networking Team

The Networking Team tends to see the network as a large collection of discrete, separate functional elements that each have a function that contributes to the operational whole. They tend to see the network elements as powerful, vital equipment that requires careful design and careful planning. A standard diagram for a medium sized data centre might look something like this:

DataCenter-network-1.jpg

Server Team

The Server Team is focussed on the Operating Systems and the platforms that run on them. Each system is discrete, and getting two server admins to agree on the same approach can be an arduous task. The see the servers a key to success, and a standard diagram fro the data centre might look something like this:

DataCenter-servers-1.jpg

Further Work

This exposition of the business perception is not complete, and further consultation should be carried out to determine the view of other business units. I am preparing a suitable proposal for a Gap Analysis to assist in offering a view on this work.

Postscript – Hi-Res Images

This post has been very popular and a number of people have asked for higher resolution images – please click on the thumbnails below for larger and better resolution images.

I have some ideas on some followups, come back and check real soon.

Postscript

The Difference Between Network and Server Managers

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About Greg Ferro
Greg is a Network and Security Architect / Designer / Engineer working freelance in the UK and worked for Resellers, DotCom's, Large Corporate's and Service Providers across a variety of products & Vendors. He prefers to work for end users, believes in the life cycle, total cost of ownership and that near enough is often good enough. He likes talking about himself in the first person to feel "royal", even when hosting the Packet Pushers Podcast on Data Networking. More about Greg at http://etherealmind.com/who-am-i/ and you can follow him on Twitter.

Comments

  1. John says:

    The images in the post don’t seem to render properly in IE, just FYI. Funny stuff BTW.

  2. stretch says:

    Nice. =)

  3. EDF Network says:

    Really Funny :) !!!

  4. nevot says:

    Not only funny. True!

  5. spzeidler says:

    Now propose the existence of network management server engineers .. ;-)

  6. Brian says:

    Found one issue, all networking engineers know that there are no friendly gnomes in the interwebs, only trolls…

  7. mike says:

    Where can we get a nice hi-res of this?

    Mike

  8. Laurence says:

    I’d like to see the Finance graph, that would be funny…

Trackbacks

  1. [...] This article is a followon to the difference between Network and Server Engineers Share and Enjoy: [...]

  2. [...] in, the Magic Gnomes have carefully examined all the ballots (in addition to the their day job of checking all the packets The poll results [...]

  3. [...] Humour – The Difference Between Network and Server Engineers [...]

  4. [...] Traditional data center had a networking infrastructure (“us”) connecting servers (“them”) to the rest of the world. The servers occasionally had some weird connections to external disks (called SAN to differentiate it from LAN) that we tried to avoid as much as possible (after all, they were the responsibility of the storage team). The focus of networking and server engineers was widely different; Greg Ferro published one the best illustrations on this conceptual gap . [...]

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