Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems [Hardcover]

Evan Marcus (Author), Hal Stern (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471356018 | ISBN-13: 978-0471356011 | Publication Date: January 31, 2000 | Edition: 1

"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

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"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

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471356018
• ISBN-13: 978-0471356011
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #605,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Candid HA for amateur or pro..., January 4, 2001

By 

Matthew C. Adduci (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems (Hardcover)

Messrs. Marcus and Stern have created a book that works for the seasoned sysadmin as well as the HA newbie. Frank depictions of case studies provide helpful insight into the many pitfalls of creating HA solutions. The "key points" sections at the end of each chapter provide quick and easy checkpoints should a reference refresher be required.

Another excellent trait of this book is its readability and realistic approach to the HA "art". The mixture of pure philosophy tempered with daily reality provided me at least, with more certainty in finding the best overall balance of reliability, availability, and manageability vs. things like cost of ownership, etc.

There is an excellent level of technical proficiency treated in the text as well. The hardcore bits and bytes folk won't be dissappointed by Mr. Stern's treatment various scenarios. The attention Mr. Marcus pays to higher level structural detail also makes you say occasionally, "gee i would have never thought of that.". (And even if you had, i doubt you would have been able to elaborate on it as humorously.) :)

It's one of the few books i refer back to occasionally, (not so surprisingly, this goes for Mr. Stern's Managing NIS/NFS book as well). Overall, it's just an extremely invaluable book that's actually a good read as well. (love the "Tales from the field" blurbs). I don't believe there's any stone regarding HA left unturned by this book. Replication, DR, backup and restores...it's all there.

I look forward to their next collaborative effort.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pearls of Wisdom, Sage Advice and Doses of Reality, December 31, 2000

By 

Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems (Hardcover)

High availability is almost like the Holy Grail - believers know it exists, but getting it can be a quest. Not that it's an elusive, impossible-to-achieve objective - it's just expensive and the path to high availability is filled with challenges, blind alleys and the risk of spending money on the wrong things.

This book covers every conceivable aspect of high availability, from application recovery to the [Zen] of service level agreements. The emphasis is on the underlying technologies, with a good deal of attention paid to processes and business considerations as well.

There are two things that stand out about this book: it is comprehensive and the authors are in-the-trenches technical types who can actually write.

It is obvious that the authors have stuggled with and mastered every technology and technique about which they have written. This is a refreshing change from the plethora of technical books written by professional writers who are assigned book projects because they have writing ability, but not necessarily any real technical background. So, in a world that is littered with books with no substance, this gem is definitely worth buying.

I am not going to rehash the table of contents, which is readily available on this page - I will say that the authors gave each of the topics excellent treatment on a number of levels. First, they have deleved into the mechanics of each topic, they have shown the strengths and weaknesses of each, and in many cases, have provided anecdotes and real-life stories about their experiences with designing and implementing similar solutions. The anecdotal content follows a pattern: it points out problems and how the authors resolved those problems when they encountered them. These alone make the book invaluable, and increase the credibility of the authors.

Who should read this book? Systems engineers and managers.

Systems engineers will benefit from the wealth of technical information provided in the book, and will also benefit from the excellent explanations of underlying mechanics of how the various technologies and solution sets work. I am sure that most systems engineers will find the book's many anecdotes to be entertaining reading that imparts valuable information.

Managers should read this book because it puts into perspective how various pieces of a high availability solution set fits together. It also provides a dose of reality that might just stop some "suit" from decreeing a technical direction without fully understanding the full set of issues and factors. This book will provide the issues and factors to managers in a readable manner.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Its a winner!, March 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems (Hardcover)

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.