Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Design and manage a highly available and resilient hybrid IT infrastructure.
• Implement standardized operating procedures for data center and server management.
• Develop a comprehensive capacity planning and performance monitoring strategy.
• Apply automation and orchestration tools to streamline infrastructure operations.
• Manage the full lifecycle of hardware and software assets effectively.
• Integrate security controls across network, compute, and storage layers.
• Develop and test robust IT Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans.
• Evaluate and manage cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS) efficiently.

• IT Infrastructure Managers and Directors
• System and Network Administrators
• Data Center Operations Professionals
• Cloud Engineers and Architects
• Service Delivery and Operations Managers
• IT Consultants focusing on infrastructure optimization

• Scenario-based exercises on diagnosing and resolving infrastructure outages.
• Group activities to design a hybrid cloud deployment model.
• Workshops on developing a capacity plan for a key business application.
• Case studies on the impact of poor asset management on budgets.
• Discussions on best practices for IaC implementation.

Unit 1: The Foundations of IT Infrastructure

• Overview of the physical and virtual infrastructure layers.
• Understanding compute (servers, virtualization), storage, and networking essentials.
• The role of the Data Center and co-location strategies.
• Introduction to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Storage (SDS).

• Developing a structured capacity planning methodology.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) for infrastructure components.
• Implementing proactive monitoring, alerting, and trend analysis.
• Techniques for infrastructure optimization and tuning.

Unit 2: Data Center and Server Management

• Server hardening and security best practices.
• Patch management and vulnerability assessment workflows.
• Configuration management and state enforcement.
• Managing specialized servers (e.g., DNS, DHCP, Web).

• Managing virtualization platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM).
• Understanding cloud deployment models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).
• Hybrid cloud integration and management strategies.
• The impact of containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) on infrastructure.

Unit 3: Service Availability and Resilience

• Designing for fault tolerance and failover capabilities.
• Load balancing and traffic management techniques.
• Understanding service dependencies and Single Points of Failure (SPOF).
• Implementing clustering and replication for critical services.

• Developing a robust backup strategy (3-2-1 rule).
• Managing different storage tiers and technologies (SAN, NAS, object storage).
• Data retention, archiving, and retrieval policies.
• Testing the recovery process (RTO, RPO verification).

Unit 4: Automation and Operations Excellence

• Introduction to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts.
• Using configuration management tools (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
• Orchestrating complex infrastructure deployment workflows.
• The shift to DevOps principles in infrastructure management.

• Developing standardized operating procedures (SOPs) and runbooks.
• Implementing a rigorous change control process for infrastructure.
• Managing maintenance windows and minimizing service disruption.
• The role of monitoring tools in change validation.

Unit 5: Financial and Asset Management

• Tracking and managing hardware and software assets throughout their lifecycle.
• Defining effective refresh and retirement strategies.
• Financial implications of IT asset management (CapEx/OpEx).
• Software license compliance and optimization.

• Identifying infrastructure consolidation and cost-saving opportunities.
• Cost modeling for infrastructure services.
• Introduction to FinOps principles for cloud spending.
• Benchmarking infrastructure costs against industry peers.