Customer Reviews

Maintaining Mission Critical Systems in a 24/7 Environment (IEEE Press Series on Power Engineering)

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This book has some good sections, which are fine by themselves. However, I found the power chapters in the first part of the book to be disorganized and poorly written. The diagrams are not clear at all, and many have a lot of information in them that should have been removed. Almost like they did cut and paste without making them relevant to the text. Many diagrams are missing labels and annotations as well. There is a chapter on power quality that starts with a very dubious analogy about grades of gasoline and sports cars and the importance of using high quality power. Then the start of the next chapter says that modern equipment can use a large range of voltages and really power quality isn't important, availability of power is. Uh...great. So, I feel the continuity of the book was poor. I haven't finished everything, but so far, I am not impressed.
As far as the content that is there, I don't feel this is really an engineering oriented book. I didn't feel there were enough methods to really made decisions about availability or reliability, just general ideas, which we all have anyway (downtime is bad, uptime is good, etc).
I don't feel it really helps you understand WHY things are, mainly it rehashes industry best practices, which in many cases are driven by the vendors who are selling products used to increase services availability. There is an interesting appendix about the national power infrastructure, but it covers a lot of things that are already in the book, which is kinda strange. This is a collection of articles, not a book really.