Managing the Reliable Design of an Enterprise IT Network Infrastructure

Abstract

Today's businesses are more and more dependent upon their information technology (IT) infrastructure. Therefore, the managers are aware of the huge costs associated with data loss (and recovery) and invest millions of dollars in special equipments in order to increase the reliability of their IT systems. Thus, the focus in this article is on the practical modalities of designing a reliable IT network infrastructure in an enterprise. In this direction an algorithm has been developed that is a hybrid between classic greedy and simulated annealing that search for the most reliable IT network infrastructure meeting the imposed budget cost constraints and the enterprise managers' decisions constraints. A key point of the proposed solution is the way in which the enterprise managers are involved in the estimation of the relative importance of their interconnections between their business's data centers. Furthermore, the algorithm presented in this article has been evaluated in the case of a retail enterprise for addressing the business's demands for a higher reliability of their IT network infrastructure.

Keywords:

• IT network infrastructure design
• management decisions
• budget cost
• IT network infrastructure reliability