Customer Reviews

Resilient Storage Networks: Designing Flexible Scalable Data Infrastructures (Digital Press Storage Technology)

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Resilient Storage Networks picks up where other books leave off. The author walks the reader through the fundamentals of storage networking and then dives deep into the data storage technologies used in building a resilient storage infrastructure. Business continuation, data management, protection and recovery, networking access interfaces and protocols, cabling, distance extension, storage I/O, and storage devices are among some of the topics discussed in detail. The author gives examples and "how-to's" in implementing appropriate solutions for different requirements. The book is particularly effective at illustrating best practice methodologies for designing and implementing storage networks. Excellent technical content and effective use of diagrams. Greg's experience and vendor-neutral approach shine through in this book.

This book is the most informative text on the market for those interested in building high available storage that is assessable across a network. Greg has written a book that is comprehensive in its scope yet readable by all those in the IT world. You will find a wealth of information on not only how to design a storage netork to meet the needs of your applications but also how to maintain it while providing the highest data availability.
I found of particular interest to me the abundance of examples on different configurations depending on a company's current infrastructure and how the connectivity could be modified to incorporate the most up to date networking technology.
I guarantee every time you read a section from this book you will come away with some new thoughts on implementing storage.

This is a very easy to understand yet comprehensive manual on resilient storage networks. Such networks are able to provide business continuation in the event that a significant disruption occurs. While there are other publications available like "Mission-Critical Network Planning" by Matthew Liotine, "Resilient Storage Networks" mainly focuses to storage media and ways to access it.

The first chapters of the book are generally educative: they cover various treats and requirements for data protection, data storage fundamentals, i.e. what is a bit and what is a byte, etc. Then it proceeds to storage networking access models and I/O interfaces. A large part of the book is devoted to fiber optics: cabling types, connectors and transceivers, link loss and power budgets, protocol drop, etc.

There are different schemes and illustrations that will help you to choose, at a higher level, to categorize the information that you store, and to build the best kind of network for it: small storage network, consolidation and intermix, metropolitan and wide are storage networks, large and high-performance networks, etc.

This is a very friendly and easy-to-understand volume. It is vendor-neutral and doesn't specify individual products and solutions. It looks at the big picture and emphasizes higher-level architectural strategies, based on existing network protocols, access models and interfaces.

This is the most complete book on SAN's that I have come across. Combined with the focus of relating technologies, components, and configurations to business needs makes it a very valuable book. I have made it recommended reading for all of my engineers.