High Availability: Design, Techniques and Processes [Hardcover]

Floyd Piedad (Author), Michael W. Hawkins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130962880 | ISBN-13: 978-0130962881 | Publication Date: December 28, 2000 | Edition: 1

Training, systems support, backup and maintenance account for nearly 80% of the total cost of today's enterprise applications -- and much of that money is spent trying to squeeze increased availability out of applications in spite of weak design and management processes. In High Availability: Design, Techniques and Processes, two leading IT experts bring together "best practices" for every people and process-related issue associated with maximizing application availability. The goal: to help enterprises dramatically improve the value of their strategic applications, without spending more money. Using extensive real-world examples and scenarios, the authors cover the entire application lifecycle. Learn how to design systems that will be easier to maintain; ensure that new systems will not increase in cost later due to problems you could have anticipated; and plan long-term availability strategies. Discover how to improve redundancy, increase standardization, simplify backups, and much more. These strategies and techniques are applicable to any IT professional, at any level, in any architecture, from traditional mainframes through client/server to leading-edge n-tier environments. For all IT professionals, including system architects, project managers, administrators, software developers and software engineers.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Introduction

Back when the mainframe ruled the world, information technology (IT) practitioners quickly learned the value of a well-managed system. They understood the value of managing problems, changes, and other issues confronting large, mission-critical computer systems running an organization's most sensitive business functions.

When the popularity of mainframes waned in favor of less costly midrange and PC systems, IT organizations were caught in the frenzy of developing and deploying new business applications with breakneck speed. Suddenly, more computing power was available to end users, who wanted to accomplish more with it than ever before. The corporate information system grew in scope, use, and importance, with no end in sight.

Now that the dust has settled somewhat, both the IT organization and the leaders of the business recognize that an unmanaged state-of-the-art computer system can be as bad as having none at all. Symptoms of this problem with unmanaged systems manifest themselves in ballooning IT costs, overworked and demoralized IT staff, and user dissatisfaction.

This book demonstrates how to deliver maximum system availability and manageability throughout a computer system's lifecycle, from design through implementation and maintenance. We review every key technique for simplifying the management and maintenance of computer systems - including redundancy, standardization, backups, and many more. We discuss practical means of implementing these techniques to make your current and future systems far less prone to outages.

We cover technical and management issues, since you cannot achieve long-term system availability and manageability solutions without addressing both. We have written this book to benefit everyone in the IT organization. Technical staff will find practical operational solutions that can be implemented immediately. IT management will gain a better perspective of the end-to-end and interrelated requirements of running an IT shop. And Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and other senior IT executives will find forward-looking strategies for enhancing the IT infrastructure and its contribution to the corporate bottom line.

You can manage systems better if you design them with high systems availability in mind. This book will show you how to address your system availability problems, from start to finish.

From the Back Cover

The complete "how-to guide" for maximizing the availability of enterprise systems.

Training, support, backup, and maintenance account for nearly 80 percent of the total cost of today's enterprise applications-and much of that money is spent trying to squeeze increased availability out of applications in spite of weak design and management processes. In High Availability, two leading IT experts bring together best practices for every people and process-related issue associated with maximizing application availability. The goal: to help enterprises dramatically improve the value of their strategic applications, without investing a dime more than necessary.

• Enhancing all four key elements of availability: reliability, recoverability, serviceability, and manageability
• Understanding how your users define availability
• Planning achievable service level agreements-and delivering on them
• Strategies for multiple platforms, from the mainframe to the desktop
• Lowering administrative costs through standardization and other techniques
• Redundancy, backup, fault tolerance, partitioning, automation, and other high availability solutions
• Leveraging availability features built into your existing hardware and operating systems

Discover how to create systems that will be easier to maintain, anticipate and prevent problems, and define ongoing availability strategies that account for business change. Whatever your IT role, whatever your IT architecture, this book can help you deliver the breakthrough availability levels your organization needs right now.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (December 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130962880
• ISBN-13: 978-0130962881
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,862,854 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another building block in the Enterprise Computing Series, January 20, 2001

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: High Availability: Design, Techniques and Processes (Hardcover)

You cannot judge a book by its cover in most cases. This book's cover, however, subtly provides clues about what's inside. The picture is a panoramic view of Hong Kong taken from Victoria Peak. It accurately portrays the book, which is a high-level view of a wide number of topics related to high availability. If you are expecting nuts-and-bolts technical information, then you are better off purchasing Blueprints for High Availability. If you want a "how to" book that blends a specific technical approach with processes you should look at Mission Critical Systems Management. However, if you want a book that provides a clear set of processes, takes a business case approach, and touches on most of the issues associated with high availability, then this book is what you are looking for.

Like Hong Kong, where realities are in the eye and mind of the beholder, the book can be viewed as addressing either high availability or service level management. In fact, the book uses service level management as the driving force behind achieving high availability.

Included in the panoramic view of high availability are the many issues and factors that need to be understood in order to achieve high availability. It starts out with reasons why high availability is important, and quickly segues into factors, such as total cost of ownership (the treatment is pretty close to what GartnerGroup has been peddling since the early 90s). It does cause one to get back to basics and consider that a high availability solution has a lot of hidden costs.

The book goes through the process chain needed to develop a business case for high availability (one of the book's strong points, in my opinion), through implementation of the solution itself. If you are familiar with other books in this series you will recognize the pattern. Unlike the companion books, though, this one does not contain contradictions or have glaring gaps in the processes. The authors have thought this one through and have the writing skills to make it readable and understandable.

The treatment of service level management is highlighted by a chapter on user availability. If you are in IT you should read and take to heart this section. User availability is a key component of aligning IT to business. The complex and myraid political issues in Hong Kong sometimes seem trite compared to the political issues that surround aligning these two factions. The authors, like seasoned China watchers, provide insights about how to understand the seemingly inscrutable players and sage advice on hot to achieve consensus among the two opposing factions.

Another area that impressed me was the attention paid to facilities as a key component of high availability. Although this was a high level view, it can serve as a checklist of considerations as you are developing the business case for high availability. There was one missing fact that I wish the authors would have highlighted: compliance with fire and safety regulations and local building codes. I have seen cases where well designed solutions that were supported by excellent processes and sound management were compromised by failing a regulatory inspection. Imagine explaining to a CEO why the multimillion dollar investment in people, process and technology failed because an inspector shut down a mission critical data center because of a building code violation.

There is some token attention paid to the technology at the end of the book where high availability features are examined for specific products. Among the products covered are Windows 2000, Novell Netware, Solaris 8, AIX and OS/400. Also covered are various hardware platforms, such as S/390, AS/400, RS/6000 and Compaq Proliant server, and Oracle 8i availability features.

Bottom line: This book is about processes. It complements and augments Blueprints for High Avalability by wrapping a sound approach to making a case for, and implementing, high availability. It is also a great companion to Mission Critical Systems Management, again by providing complementary processes to the approach taken in that excellent book.

I wish the authors had summarized the issues and factors in an appendix of checklists, but other than that, this book is a solid addition to any service delivery library.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A High Level Overview, April 26, 2001

By 

Chuck (AsiaPacific (HK)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Availability: Design, Techniques and Processes (Hardcover)

This is a very high level view on the subject of HA, as previous reviewers state. It does present some basic guidlines at the system, network, and operational level which in my experience are so basic and intuitive, that I wonder why the author needs to state in "Special techniques for system realiability", that you should purchase from reputable supplies and even to recommend not to use shareware and freeware ? In general for a CEO or Manager who knows nothing on HA, this book is for you. This is a non technical brief, and its undenable shortcomings are its lack of coverage on recent hardware and software based clustering, cashing and load balansing technologies in the market now, specifcally related to e-commerce applications, middleware and CMS tools which now incorporate many HA features. Additionally, its lacks clear focus with hardly any case studies or real worl examples, and the primary examples of HA in the defintion of the author are client server related hardware technologies such as RAID, redundant NIC's and clustering examples.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A High Level Overview, April 26, 2001

By 

Chuck (AsiaPacific (HK)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Availability: Design, Techniques and Processes (Hardcover)

This is a very high level view on the subject of HA, as previous reviewers state. It does present some basic guidlines at the system, network, and operational level which in my experience are so basic and intuitive, that I wonder why the author needs to state in "Special techniques for system realiability", that you should purchase from reputable supplies and even to recommend not to use shareware and freeware ? In general for a CEO or Manager who knows nothing on HA, this book is for you. This is a non technical brief, and its undenable shortcomings are its lack of coverage on recent hardware and software based clustering, cashing and load balansing technologies in the market now, specifcally related to e-commerce applications, middleware and CMS tools which now incorporate many HA features. Additionally, its lacks clear focus with hardly any case studies or real worl examples, and the primary examples of HA in the defintion of the author are client server related hardware technologies such as RAID, redundant NIC's and clustering examples.