Newbie IT student. Question about a homework assignment

Question

I'm a new student in an IT program, and I'm trying to make sense of what this means:

Design for the following non-functional business problem:

Your business delivers Internet services, by deploying compute infrastructure into rented data centers, which have transit partnerships. In order to sustain these services, it is important to track all of the infrastructure, so that the status of it may be communicated to the applications which rely on it, and in order to manage it. It is moving beyond the scope of a single spreadsheet, which one person can administer, and needs to go into a database for concurrent access before a infrastructure management platform can be selected.

There are going to be up to 10 data centers, each with 2 to 4 transit providers.

Each data center has between 2 and 50 racks, and two core routers.

Each rack has 2 power supplies, 2 switches, 1 storage shelf (4U) and 20 spaces for 1U servers.

Each storage shelf has 48 SAS SSDs, and each 1U server has 12 SSDs.

Use modeling to conclude a relational database design which can migrate this need out of a single spreadsheet. Provide evidence of the design, by submitting the PostgreSQL DDL. An export of a spreadsheet will be provided, and sample python for populating a given model.

A data set for populating your database, can be found at: infrastructure.tgzView in a new window

Of course, it is a compressed tar file which contains the following files: uplinks.csv, infrastructure.csv, and media.csv.

Data model designs with less abstraction will be the easiest to populate with these data. Focus on pulling out a simple sample of the data, in order to prove the population of the set of tables by mapping the natural keys, to generated primary and foreign keys.

Now, the class is fine and good and the instructor is funny and intelligent, but I'm not sure what to do as the pace moves a bit quicker than a baby programmer is used to. Would the following steps be right?

1. Go into Violet UML Editor and craft the database
2. Export this model into something
3. Go into the Postgres I set up in linux
4. use the database our instructor set up, and link that to the assignment

I'm not looking for someone to do my homework, but an explanation of the underlying concepts and some links would be amazing.

Answer 1

I'm no expert, but it seems to me you should be giving this feedback to your tutor.

If you feel like you're not sure how to proceed with the work, clearly they are not communicating their expectations well and they should find that out - they won't if you don't tell them!