http://www.infrastructures.org/
Most IT organizations still install and maintain computers the same way the automotive industry built cars in the early 1900's: An individual craftsman manually manipulates a machine into being, and manually maintains it afterward. This is expensive. The automotive industry discovered first mass production, then mass customization using standard tooling.
http://www.infrastructures.org/bootstrap/thinking.shtml
the single most useful thing a would-be infrastructure architect can do is develop a certain mindset: A good infrastructure, whether departmental, divisional, or enterprise-wide, is a single loosely-coupled enterprise cluster, with hundreds or thousands of hard drives and CPU's
