Amazon.com Review
Highly available storage... is there another kind worth having?
Highly Available Storage for Windows Servers describes proper design, implementation, and management of high-performance hard disk systems based on Microsoft Windows 2000 and Veritas Volume Manager. It's one of the few published documents on the Veritas system around, but that's not the only reason to consider Paul Massiglia's work. He does a great job of explaining what it means for a system's data store to be highly available, and pinpoints potential trouble areas (from the physical platters on up) that can keep systems from that ideal.
He also deserves commendation for explaining some of the supporting technologies--server clustering and RAID systems--that make high availability of disk data possible. With an increasing number of shops implementing more coherent storage-management policies, a growing number of administrators need to add storage systems to their bag of tricks. This book clarifies many essentials for such people.
Massiglia doesn't appear to be a bulletproofing zealot. Rather than place data safety above all else, he seems to do a reasonable job of balancing requirements (performance, safety, and money) against one another. He and his editors have also done a good job of illustrating their potentially dull subject. Nearly every page has at least one illustration (most illustrations are screen shots), and the explanatory prose is crisp and illuminating. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to build and operate storage subsystems for reliable servers, using RAID, the clustering variants of Microsoft Windows 2000, and Veritas Volume Manager. This is mostly Veritas documentation, but there's good coverage of disk concepts and of server cluster provisioning rules, as well.
From the Back Cover
A guide to managing online storage in Windows server environments
Managing online storage effectively is becoming an essential component of the information processing strategy as enterprises place increasing reliance on their data assets. The many online storage management options available for the Windows server environment can be bewildering to a system administrator, however. In this book, Paul Massiglia draws on his twenty-plus years of experience in enterprise data storage to dispel the uncertainty and provide the Windows system administrator with a complete toolkit for online storage management.
Starting with an explanation of how disks can be combined under software management to enhance data availability and I/O performance, Massiglia goes on to discuss hardware and software implementation options available in the Windows server environment. Numerous examples illustrate the use of both embedded and external RAID subsystems, as well as software management of logical disk volumes to provide failure-tolerant, high-performance online storage for Windows server applications.
Using both capabilities delivered by the Windows 2000 operating system and enhanced features of the VERITAS Volume Manager-- the de facto standard for Windows online data storage-- Massiglia illustrates how to organize disks so that all data can receive the right balance of availability, I/O performance, and storage cost. You'll learn about:
* Intelligent disk drives
* Storage architectures for enterprise servers
* Combining disks into logical volumes to improve data availability and I/O performance
* Properties of striping, mirroring, and RAID technologies
* Hardware and software alternatives for implementing logical volumes
* Using failure-tolerant volumes to reduce backup windows
* Managing logical volumes in clusters of Windows servers
* Long-distance data replication for publication and disaster recovery
Wiley Computer Publishing. Timely. Practical. Reliable.
Visit our Web site at www.wiley.com/compbooks/
Visit the VERITAS Web site at www.veritas.com
