Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Evan Marcus is a Senior Systems Engineer at VERITAS Software Corporation and co-designed a key piece of the first commercial Sun-based software for High Availability. He has been the company's consultant for successful implementations of VERITAS High Availability Products around the world.

Hal Stern is a Distinguished Systems Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He has led reliability and improvement teams for several financial services clients and focuses on performance, reliability, and networked system architecture. He is also the author of Managing NFS and NIS.

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"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

Your system will crash! The reason could be something as complex as network congestion or something as mundane as an operating system fault. The good news is that there are steps you can take to maximize your system availability and prevent serious downtime. This authoritative book will provide you with the tools to deploy a system with confidence. The authors guide you through the building of a network that runs with high availability, resiliency, and predictability. They clearly show you how to assess the elements of a system that can fail, select the appropriate level of reliability, and provide steps for designing, implementing, and testing your solution to reduce downtime to a minimum. All the while, they help you determine how much you can afford to spend by balancing costs and benefits. This book of practical, hands–on blueprints:
∗ Examines what can go wrong with the various components of your system
∗ Provides twenty 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

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Steps Toward an Always-On Network.

Everywhere we look, networks matter. Around the world, the global Internet and related information networks are transforming every aspect of business, government, education, and culture. With so much happening, at such astounding speed, it's easy to forget that the Internet and network computing axe still in their infancy. We sense that even more dramatic changes are still to come, and that we have caught only a brief glimpse of the technology's ability to improve our lives. Compare today's computer networks, for example, to the global long distance telephone network. A ten-key pad of buttons gives us access to virtually anyplace on earth, and a world wide directory system helps us to quickly locate businesses and individuals. When we use this system, its incredible complexity is almost entirely invisible to us. Moreover, we expect this global network and its familiar dial tone to always be available. We take it for granted that the network is always on.

High availability systems, the subject of this book, represent one of the chief means to achieving the goal of always-on computer networks. This branch of systems engineering began with the need to ensure the availability of critical applications running within organizations. As information networks became more central to doing business, the number of applications deemed critical to doing business expanded and the demand for high availability systems increased. Today, with the walls of the organization coming down and businesses everywhere extending their networks and applications to the Internet, the availability of networked systems has become a top priority. In the context of e-business, downtime puts you out of business. Not only do you lose money the instant the system fails, you risk losing the attention and loyalty of your online customers.

The positive side of all this is that high-availability technology has dramatically improved to meet the e-business challenge. Clustering and fail over software, once limited to exotic and extremely expensive hardware, is now available, at a much lower cost, for standard hardware and open, flexible operating environments. New management software makes it easier and more cost effective for businesses to monitor and control availability. New guidelines and methodologies, such as those outlined in this book, are helping businesses and solutions designers intelligently build high availability into their networks.

For all that's state of the art in high availability, there can be no better guides than the authors of this book. Evan Marcus of VERITAS Software and Hal Stern of Sun Microsystems are true experts in the field of high availability, as well as hands-on scientists who understand the challenges faced by systems designers, solutions providers, and IT and e-business managers. If you represent any of those groups, you can rely on this book for information on the technologies and methods you'll need to design and implement high availability systems. In other words, this book will help you transform the vision of always-on networks into a reality.