Blueprints for High Availability

Rating:
Summary: Practical, Hands-On Blueprints
Review: "Rely on this book for information on the technologies and methods you'll need to design and implement high-availability systems...It will help you transform the vision of always-on networks into a reality." - Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Novell Corporation

This book: *Examines what can go wrong with the various components of your system *Provides 20 key system design principles for attaining resilience and high availability *Discusses how to arrange disks and disk arrays for protection against hardware failures *Looks at failovers, the software that manages them, and sorts through the myriad of different failover configurations *Provides techniques for improving network reliability and redundancy *Reviews techniques for replicating data and applications to other systems across a network *Offers guidance on application recovery *Examines Disaster Recovery

Rating:
Summary: If you are serious about HA....
Review: .. you need this book (2nd edition). There are no products that provide availability for the entire enterprise.
Most HA products are point products and even those that claim to be general purpose are selectively deployed because they are either too costly and/or difficult to deploy. And none of the general purpose HA products scale to handle current trends with racks of blade servers and SANs.
Basically, if you are serious about HA you need to glue many technologies together and this book covers it all. In many cases it won't show you exactly how to do it since the book is vendor neutral. But more importantly, it provides the essential background information you'll need from selecting storage technologies to deploying disaster recovery plans -- and everything in between.

Rating:
Summary: If you are serious about HA....
Review: .. you need this book (2nd edition). There are no products that provide availability for the entire enterprise.
Most HA products are point products and even those that claim to be general purpose are selectively deployed because they are either too costly and/or difficult to deploy. And none of the general purpose HA products scale to handle current trends with racks of blade servers and SANs.
Basically, if you are serious about HA you need to glue many technologies together and this book covers it all. In many cases it won't show you exactly how to do it since the book is vendor neutral. But more importantly, it provides the essential background information you'll need from selecting storage technologies to deploying disaster recovery plans -- and everything in between.

Rating:
Summary: One of the few books I'm actually PROUD to own
Review: An excellent overview of high availability techniques. Starts with "why and how much HA do you need", and goes all the way through the hardware and design side of HA.

Doesn't describe any product in details, the authors explicitly refrain from doing so. Instead, the book makes you think the right way by pointing at the actual problems and offering actual decisions. Upon reading this book you can easily answer the question "what can we do to make it work", not "what brand of server should we buy".

Covers HA theory, redundant hardware, redundant systems design, failover techniques, replication, backups, procedures, disaster recovery.

The only thing that I didn't like and still can remember (a year later that I've read it), is that in my opinion the authors should stay totally clear off the "how to write a stable software" side of HA. There is like 2 pages of that, and it doesn't sound like anything sane.

Clear language. Solid visual design. Lots of (fun and) real-life samples. See the title of the review.

Rating:
Summary: One of the few books I'm actually PROUD to own
Review: An excellent overview of high availability techniques. Starts with "why and how much HA do you need", and goes all the way through the hardware and design side of HA.

Doesn't describe any product in details, the authors explicitly refrain from doing so. Instead, the book makes you think the right way by pointing at the actual problems and offering actual decisions. Upon reading this book you can easily answer the question "what can we do to make it work", not "what brand of server should we buy".

Covers HA theory, redundant hardware, redundant systems design, failover techniques, replication, backups, procedures, disaster recovery.

The only thing that I didn't like and still can remember (a year later that I've read it), is that in my opinion the authors should stay totally clear off the "how to write a stable software" side of HA. There is like 2 pages of that, and it doesn't sound like anything sane.

Clear language. Solid visual design. Lots of (fun and) real-life samples. See the title of the review.

Rating:
Summary: Design Your Own
Review: Anyone who has ever worked with me in the past knows I'm somewhat of an availability freak. It is the mark of a network administrator's excellence if they can say they maintain a 99.75% availability rating. High Availability as a design concept has kind of been brushed off to the side in recent years. This book was written is 2000 and at that time I think I bought about three books on the subject. Nothing new has been written about it. During the year 2000 there was a lot of discussion about availability in the private sector since a company like Amazon.com or any other on-line retailer lost big bucks if they were down for just minutes. Availability rating was the most important benchmark of a company's network. This book is my favorite on the subject because it is easy to understand. Cisco published a book on availability and you had to be a CCIE to understand the Introduction. This book is easy to read and marked with good illustrations to emphasize things like RAID, SANs, redundant routing, etc. Hardware companies have built servers, hard drives, controllers, etc. with high availability in mind so for the network administrator it is no longer critical for them to understand or be able to explain availability. However, high availability as a design concept is still the standard and once you understand how it all works and what the difference between 99% versus 99.75% availability you can take steps to maintain that high availability of your network systems.

Rating:
Summary: Design Your Own
Review: Anyone who has ever worked with me in the past knows I'm somewhat of an availability freak. It is the mark of a network administrator's excellence if they can say they maintain a 99.75% availability rating. High Availability as a design concept has kind of been brushed off to the side in recent years. This book was written is 2000 and at that time I think I bought about three books on the subject. Nothing new has been written about it. During the year 2000 there was a lot of discussion about availability in the private sector since a company like Amazon.com or any other on-line retailer lost big bucks if they were down for just minutes. Availability rating was the most important benchmark of a company's network. This book is my favorite on the subject because it is easy to understand. Cisco published a book on availability and you had to be a CCIE to understand the Introduction. This book is easy to read and marked with good illustrations to emphasize things like RAID, SANs, redundant routing, etc. Hardware companies have built servers, hard drives, controllers, etc. with high availability in mind so for the network administrator it is no longer critical for them to understand or be able to explain availability. However, high availability as a design concept is still the standard and once you understand how it all works and what the difference between 99% versus 99.75% availability you can take steps to maintain that high availability of your network systems.

Rating:
Summary: More on the relationship between security issues and HA
Review: as I was reading this otherwise excellent book, I noticed that there was a very important theme (to my understanding), which wasn't honored enough attention; namely, issues relating to the 'Secure Socket Layer' protocol and availability, which directly translates to money coming your or someone else's way.

How does it affect the HA and your web applications architecture? SSL Certificates in a HA setting? . . . etc. All diagrams would present the web farm directly facing the internet!?

I even stopped reading and went to the index looking for it and found that there were indeed two -very basic- blurbs on it on pages 301 and 352.

I know security is a theme by itself, but the relationship between security issues and HA is way too fundamental to simply skim over them. As a matter of fact I would say that number one issue affecting HA is security.

Also the book has a very SA oriented (am I talking about another book already? ;-)) style. I would like to read a little more about 'the Physics' of it. For example, cosmic rays' (I am not joking), like neutrinos, influence on the proper/stable functioning of computers is greater than the, comparatively speaking, very anomalous 'split brain' types of errors and more on, electric accidents, the effective use of ECC memory. Should it go in the Web servers, too, in addition to the data centers? Why?

Cabling and electromagnetic inductance issues are mentioned in the 'Tales from the Field', but I could see some people expecting a more rounding explanation/solution to the 'tales'. In the case in which they talk about a java web server people might have the impression that 'Java' or its use in a web server was wrong, which
I could tell was most probably not the case, but the use of JSP without specifying the sessions shouldn't be automatically created, which is the default many developers forget.

Rating:
Summary: More on the relationship between security issues and HA
Review: as I was reading this otherwise excellent book, I noticed that there was a very important theme (to my understanding), which wasn't honored enough attention; namely, issues relating to the `Secure Socket Layer' protocol and availability, which directly translates to money coming your or someone else's way.

How does it affect the HA and your web applications architecture? SSL Certificates in a HA setting? . . . etc. All diagrams would present the web farm directly facing the internet!?

I even stopped reading and went to the index looking for it and found that there were indeed two -very basic- blurbs on it on pages 301 and 352.

I know security is a theme by itself, but the relationship between security issues and HA is way too fundamental to simply skim over them. As a matter of fact I would say that number one issue affecting HA is security.

Also the book has a very SA oriented (am I talking about another book already? ;-)) style. I would like to read a little more about `the Physics' of it. For example, cosmic rays' (I am not joking), like neutrinos, influence on the proper/stable functioning of computers is greater than the, comparatively speaking, very anomalous `split brain' types of errors and more on, electric accidents, the effective use of ECC memory. Should it go in the Web servers, too, in addition to the data centers? Why?

Cabling and electromagnetic inductance issues are mentioned in the `Tales from the Field', but I could see some people expecting a more rounding explanation/solution to the `tales'. In the case in which they talk about a java web server people might have the impression that `Java' or its use in a web server was wrong, which
I could tell was most probably not the case, but the use of JSP without specifying the sessions shouldn't be automatically created, which is the default many developers forget.

Rating:
Summary: Its a winner!
Review: Finally a book that specifically discusses the very important topic of availability. The book discusses how to address each layer of an infrastructure from the data layer, network, application, etc. with an emphasis on availability requirements. I found it to be an excellent synthesis of all of the components of end-to-end availability. Anyone involved in Web Architecture and design will certainly find value in this book. My only criticism is that there are a few plugs specifically for Veritas but as a fan of their products it didn't bother me.