Customer Reviews

Mission-Critical Network Planning

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This book presents strategies, practices, and techniques to plan networks that are survivable and have stable behavior. Although the practice of disaster recovery emphasizes restoration from outages and disruptions, this book is not intended to be a book on disaster recovery, Instead, it discusses hot to design survivability and performance into a network, using conventional networking technologies and practices, and how to create the ability to recover from a variety of problems. The author tells you what to look out for and what to keep in mind, and discusses the benefits and caveats of doing things a certain way.

The book doesn't specify individual technologies, products and solutions. It looks at the big picture and emphasizes higher-level architectural strategies.

This book is about network continuity. It is the ability of a network to continue operations in light lf a disruption, regardless of the origins, while resources affected by the disruption are restored. In contrast to disaster recovery, network continuity stresses an avoidance approach that proactively implements measures to protect infrastructure and system from unplanned events, using techniques in distributed redundancy, replication, and network management, to create a self-healing environment.

The book starts with principles of continuity in generic terms: fault mechanics, redundancy, tolerance, topologies, etc. Another chapter is devoted to metrics and measurements like recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), mean time to failure (MTTF), exposure metrics, cost metrics, risk/loss metrics, performance metrics, and so on. The following chapter list basic networks topologies like star, mesh, ring, bus, etc. There is a chapter devoted to clustering, load balancing, switching and redirection. As about continuity, there are separate chapters devoted to network access continuity, software application continuity, storage continuity and continuity testing.

Each chapter throughout the book is completed by a references section, which points to various magazine articles.

I also recommend "Resilient Storage Networks" by Greg Schulz in addition to this book.