BLUEPRINTS FOR HIGH AVAILABILITY, SECOND EDITION

Expert techniques for designing your system to achieve maximum availability and predictable downtime

With your company's reputation and profits at stake, downtime on your 24/7 web site is not an option, nor is poor application performance. Now in its second edition, this authoritative book provides you with the design blueprints to maximize your system availability.

Striking a balance between costs and benefits, the authors show you all of the elements of your computer system that can fail-as well as ways to assess their reliability and attain resiliency and high availability for each one. A unique feature is "Tales from the Field," a collection of true-to-life experiences that will help you avoid mistakes and deploy your system with confidence.

Learn how to design your system to limit the impact of such problems as computer viruses, natural disasters, or the corruption of critical files and discover how to:
* Implement effective backup-and-restore and tape management strategies
* Arrange disks and disk arrays to avoid downtime caused by inevitable failures
* Utilize technologies such as Storage Area Networks (SANs), Network Attached Storage (NAS), Virtualization, and clustering
* Achieve effective application recovery after any part of the system has failed
* Replicate critical data to remote systems across a network

EVAN MARCUS is a Principal Engineer for VERITAS Software. With more than twelve years of experience in the field of high availability, he is a frequent speaker at industry technical conferences.
HAL STERN is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Services business unit of Sun Microsystems. He has worked on reliability and availability issues for some of the largest online trading and sports information sites as well as several network service providers.

Contents.

Preface.

About the Authors.

Chapter 1: Introduction.

Chapter 2: What to Measure.

Chapter 3: The Value of Availability.

Chapter 4: The Politics of Availability.

Chapter 5: 20 Key High Availability Design Principles.

Chapter 6: Backups and Restores.

Chapter 7: Highly Available Data Management.

Chapter 8: SAN, NAS, and Virtualization.

Chapter 9: Networking.

Chapter 10: Data Centers and the Local Environment.

Chapter 11: People and Processes.

Chapter 12: Clients and Consumers.

Chapter 13: Application Design.

Chapter 14: Data and Web Services.

Chapter 15: Local Clustering and Failover.

Chapter 16: Failover Management and Issues.

Chapter 17: Failover Configurations.

Chapter 18: Data Replication.

Chapter 19: Virtual Machines and Resource Management.

Chapter 20: The Disaster Recovery Plan.

Chapter 21: A Resilient Enterprise*.

Chapter 22: A Brief Look Ahead.

Chapter 23: Parting Shots.

Index.