The 7 terms admins need to demystify to the business

I forget sometimes when I’m talking to friends and family that they have no idea what I mean when I use certain terms. We all do that, right? For example, we’ll toss out words like “cloud” when we mean the Internet, not to confuse our audience but because we’re caught up in the current technojargon. But when we do so with our business colleagues, we risk confirming IT’s propeller-head stereotype and, even worse, having them tune out what we’re saying.

But if they don’t understand what we’re trying to say, they can’t make good business decisions about their use of and investments in technology. So here’s a cheat sheet for the admin terms that we all drop into conversation but need to explain to our business colleagues and even to our IT peers who aren’t admins. And let’s admit it: We don’t always understand these terms either, so here’s your chance to bone up and prevent future embarrassment or cluelessness.

[ Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in InfoWorld editors’ 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report. | Follow the latest Windows developments in InfoWorld’s Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]

1. Active Directory (AD): Although it’s been out for 10 years, Active Directory is not really grasped by many nonadmin folks. Active Directory is a directory service; at its base, it’s like a telephone book that contains the names, addresses, phone numbers, and so forth of all the users in your company, but it goes beyond that. It’s also the mechanism for which people provide their usernames and passwords to be able to log in to various domains (network “sections”). It lets admins group domains together and apply different access settings to those groups to ensure resources (like files and folder or printers) are used only by people who have access rights. In addition, its Group Policy control feature helps ensure policies are applied throughout your organization.

2. Group Policy: This is a feature of an Active Directory organization that allows you to standardize the background of users’ desktops, prohibit users from accessing certain tools in Windows, and deploy software to your users. Group policies can be created and applied to sites, domains, and organizational units, which are implemented within Active Directory to organize your users, workstations, and servers based on physical location groupings or logical departmental groupings. The number of policy settings runs into the thousands and is a must-know subject for any Windows admin.

3. TCP/IP: This set of protocols provides an address for each computer on your network or on the Internet, thus making them easy to locate. The IP address takes the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, such as 192.168.1.1. A user can see his or her Windows IP address by opening a command prompt and typing ipconfig. (Type ipconfig /all to see additional information about your IP configuration.) The first number is your overall network, sort of like a state in a postal address. The second number is your subnet mask, which is a zone sort of like a city in a postal address. The third number is the router address, sort of like your street in a postal address. And the fourth number is your device’s specific address, like a house number in a street address.

4. Unified communications: Everyone is tossing this term out these days, but what it actually means is usually vendor-specific. Microsoft has unified messaging (UM), which comes from Exchange 2007 and 2010 and involves textual information such as email and instant messaging. To go from UM to UC (which includes voice and video communication), you have to add an Office Communications Server (OCS) or Lync server into the mix. To go one step further and have unified communications and collaboration (UCC), in which documents can be shared and worked on by a group, you have to include a SharePoint server in the environment as well. On the UC side, you’ll see another acronym: VoIP, for Voice over Internet Protocol. It lets voice data such as phone calls be transmitted and managed on the computer network, such as to allow a universal inbox for text and voice.

5. Virtualization: The current generation of servers is incredibly powerful, which may be exactly what you need for running intense applications, such as an Exchange mailbox server. However, depending on the application and the load that your people place on it, you might be able to use a single server for multiple tasks. A server software package like Exchange is one big task, but it’s desiged to run by itself on a server machine, so much of that server machine’s resources are wasted. That’s where virtualization comes in: It convinces the server machine it is actually several machines, so you can load multiple tasks on it, each thinking they have their own phsyical server machine. (The trick to this is a technology called a hypervisor that basically juggles these virtual machines on the physical machine.) The benefits of virtualization include easier management and the reduction of physical servers needed, along with the resources they use, such as power, cooling, and storage. But the initial deployment cost of virtualization can be steep in time, dollars, and staff.

6. High availability (HA): It’s easy to think of high availability as meaning just high uptime — that is, the percentage of time that the network is running and available. But high availability means more. It means the percentage of time the resources on the network are available to do their job. For example, if my Exchange server database crashes or gets corrupted, email is no longer available, even though the network is. My uptime hasn’t changed, but my availability has dropped. High-availability systems are designed to keep everything running at , even as the demands increase. A common feature of high-availability systems is failover, so if one component has a problem, resources are moved to the other units rather than stop or crash. Often servers are clustered (grouped) to allow easy failover. Another high-availability technique, found in Exchange 2007 and 2010, is continuous replication technology, which ensures that backup databases are kept current continuously as changes made to the master are immediately replicated on the backups, rather than wait to do the backup during slow periods.

7. Cloud computing: Personally, I think this is one of the worst buzzwords invented. It’s used all over town as the cure-all to every problem IT might have. InfoWorld has a great definition of cloud computing, explaining what it is and is not. Basically, cloud computing is the use of Internet-based resources to deliver computing capabilities as needed, such as access to applications (software as a service, or SaaS), to storage and other resources (infrastructure as a servce), and whole computing enviroments for development, prototyping, or remote computing (platform as a service).

This article, “The 7 terms admins need to demystify to the business,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in business software and Windows at InfoWorld.com.