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:

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:

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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