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SECTION 5.2
BUILDING SUSTAINABLE MIS
INFRASTRUCTURES
The section emphasizes the need to keep business systems up-and-running
24x7x365 while continuing to be exible, scalable, reliable, and available is
no easy task. Organizations today must continually watch new architecture
trends to ensure they can keep up with new and disruptive technologies.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
Learning Outcome 5.4: Identify the environmental impacts
associated with MIS.
Increased energy consumption, increased electronic waste, and increased
carbon emissions are all associated with MIS. Ewaste refers to discarded,
obsolete, or broken electronic devices. Sustainable MIS disposal refers to the
safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle.
Learning Outcome 5.5: Explain the three components of a
sustainable MIS infrastructure along with their business bene-ts.
The components of a sustainable MIS infrastructure include:
Grid computing: A collection of computers, often geographically
dispersed, that are coordinated to solve a common problem.
Cloud computing: The use of resources and applications hosted remotely
on the Internet. The term comes (at least in part) from the image of a
cloud to represent the Internet or some large networked environment.
Virtualized computing: The creation of multiple “virtual” machines on a
single computing device.
CLASSROOM OPENER
Grid Computing
Discuss some real-world examples of grid applications (not mentioned in the
book):
A company needing to reach a decision on the placement of a new factory
invokes a sophisticated 4nancial forecasting model from an Application
Service Provider (ASP), providing the ASP with access to appropriate
proprietary historical data from a corporate database on storage systems
operated by a Storage Service Provider (SSP). During the decision-making
meeting, what-if scenarios are run collaboratively and interactively, even
though the division heads participating in the decision are located in
di6erent cities. The ASP itself contracts with a cycle provider for additional
"oomph" during particularly demanding scenarios, requiring of course that
cycles meet desired security and performance requirements.
An industrial consortium formed to develop a feasibility study for a
next-generation supersonic aircraft undertakes a highly accurate
multidisciplinary simulation of the entire aircraft. This simulation
integrates proprietary software components developed by di6erent
participants, with each component operating on that participant’s
computers and having access to appropriate design databases and other
data made available to the consortium by its members.
A crisis management team responds to a chemical spill by using local
weather and soil models to estimate the spread of the spill, determining
the impact based on population location as well as geographic features
such as rivers and water supplies, creating a shortterm mitigation plan
(perhaps based on chemical reaction models), and tasking emergency
response personnel by planning and coordinating evacuation, notifying
hospitals, and so forth.
Thousands of physicists at hundreds of laboratories and universities
worldwide come together to design, create, operate, and analyze the
products of a major detector at CERN, the European high energy physics
laboratory. During the analysis phase, they pool their computing, storage,
and networking resources to create a "Data Grid" capable of analyzing
petabytes of data.
CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Intel and Apple
Ask your students if they use an Intel based Apple (Macintosh). If they raise
their hands, they have the ability to use virtualization. Parallels Desktop and
VMware Fusion make it possible to run Windows and other PC-based
operating systems on a Mac. Until the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Server, Apple's software license agreement explicitly forbade running
multiple copies of Mac OS X Server on a single Mac, preventing Parallels and
VMware from including Mac OS X Server among the operating systems that
could be virtualized legally.
CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Understanding SOA
Tell your students to imagine for a moment that they have a goal to get from
their house in Cleveland, Ohio, to a hotel in Denver, Colorado. How might
they accomplish this?
A few responses might be… You will drive in your car to o6-site parking near
an airport. You’ll park your car and ride a shuttle bus to the airport where (if
you successfully get through security) you board an airplane for Denver.
When you get o6, you walk to the taxi stand and take a taxi to the hotel.
Each of these modes of transportation — car, the shuttle bus, the airplane,
and the taxi — came together as you needed them. Or, said another way,
when you set out from your home in Cleveland, you had not speci4ed the
entire transportation network from exactly which shuttle bus you would take
to exactly which taxi you would use. In addition, at the intersection of each of
these transportation modes — where one mode stopped and you were not
yet at your goal — there is likely more than one option you can use that will
take you a step closer to your destination. For example, you could have
started from your house with a walk to a light rail station that took you
directly into the airport terminal, thus eliminating the car ride and the shuttle
bus.
In this analogy, one could call the transportation modes “services.” A service
can be de4ned as “the capability to perform work for another, the
speci4cation of the work o6ered for another, and the o6er to perform work
for another.” The car, airplane, bus, taxi, and light rail are all services used
to reach the end goal.
Here is an excellent short video that you can use to support the analogy
above.
http://www.infoworld.com/video/archives/2007/03/soa.html
CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Ray Kurzweil Video: How Technology’s Accelerating Power
will Transform Us
Proli4c inventor and outrageous visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant,
grounded detail why -- by the 2020s -- we will have reverse-engineered the
human brain, and nanobots will be operating your consciousness. Kurzweil
draws on years of research to show the speed at which technology is
evolving, and projects forward into an almost unthinkable future to outline
the ways we'll use technology to augment our own capabilities, forever
blurring the lines between human and machine.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38
CLASSROOM EXERCISE
One Laptop Per Child
Nicholas Negroponte lays out the details of his nonpro4t One Laptop Per
Child project. Speaking just days after relinquishing his post as director of the
MIT Media Lab, he announces that he'll pursue this venture for the rest of his
life. He takes us inside the strategy for building the "$100 laptop," and
explains why and how the project plans to launch "at scale," with millions of
units distributed in the 4rst seven countries. "This is not a laptop project; it's
an education project," he says.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/41
CLASSROOM EXERCISE
Making Movies that Change
Je6 Skoll made his fortune as the 4rst president of eBay. Now he's spending it
at the movies. His company, Participant Productions, makes entertaining,
issues-driven 4lms that inspire real change -- Murderball, Syriana, An
Inconvenient Truth ... Here, he talks about the people who've inspired him to
do good, and about some upcoming 4lms that will open your eyes.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/170
CORE MATERIAL
The core chapter material is covered in detail in the PowerPoint slides. Each
slide contains detailed teaching notes including exercises, class activities,
questions, and examples. Please review the PowerPoint slides for detailed
notes on how to teach and enhance the core chapter material.
