Customer Reviews

Storage Area Networks For Dummies

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The second edition of Storage Area Networks For Dummies by the same authors is available. That edition has a computer photo on the cover rather than Dummies man.

The ISBN for the second edition is 0470385138. You can search on that ISBN to find the most up-to-date information on SANs, including iSCSI, data de-duplication, and storage virtualization solutions.

This is the first book that I have seen that gives a clear and concise over view of SAN. I have looked at several books, and while they may be very good and detailed, they usually assume that the reader has has previous experiece with SAN servers. In essence they describe their speciality and not how the system works as a whole. You could say that they describe a tree or particular plant and not the ecology of the whole forest.

This book begins at a high level explaining how the system works as a whole and then works down to the detail level with examples of installing switches and servers, with command line entry examples.

If you are getting started in system adminiatration and storage servers, I highly recommend this book as one of your first reads. This books covers using both Windows and UNIX.

I had very little experience with storage before reading this book. Now I feel that I've been properly armed with the basics such that I could dig into an environment and know pretty much what's going on and would be able to draw up an architecture diagram from what I'd be able to learn looking at switches and such. Definitely a good primer for those with little to no storage experience.

Considering the second edition was released in January 2009, it is appalling how little iSCSI is mentioned. According to the index iSCSI is referenced on fewer than 15 of the book's 437 pages. Two SAN vendors have earned a living doing only iSCSI for over eight years and nearly all the rest offer both iSCSI and FC, so to treat this important SAN technology so lightly in 2008 when this book was going into its second edition was a fatal error to my mind. The author needs to rewrite this book quickly to address not only iSCSI, but also storage virtualization (11 pages), tiering of storage (0 pages), serial attached SCSI (SAS) (0 pages), solid-state drives (0 pages), SATA (2 pages), and thin provisioning (0 pages), to name a few. If you know you need Fiber Channel this book has some utility, but as an overiew of the state of the SAN world at press time or today, it is sadly lacking.

Hardly a mention of iSCSI and mostly deals with 1 & 2MBit Fiber Channel, which displays some of it's age. Though, it does a reasonable job of explaining LUN's, naming conventions and the security models in reasonably simplistic terminology. I personally wanted to know more specifically about iSCSI and other newer technologies.

I read this book just before taking an HP SAN training class and before this book I knew Zero about SAN; after I not only understood the class, I understood it well. I told my teacher I was going to try to take the snia exam and he looked through the book and said it was written well and covered most if not all of the important material.

This book gives a complete view on SANs in a very clear language, with lots of techical information and practical examples. It is the best book I know to obtain a more than enough knowledge to decide what to buy and how to design and implement. Simply great.

While working at a large SF Bay Area IT company as a marketing manager, I was transferred from the microprocessor division to the storage department. "Storage Area Networks for Dummies" was a wonderful resource for getting up to speed with the technologies and terminology of my new world. Over the last 5 years I have recommened it time and time again to marketing managers new to storage.

If you can grasp the concepts in the first 2 chapters, you will learn enough to follow the industry. And the rest of the book is a wonderful reference for non-techies.

I was assigned the task by my company to install a SAN without ever having seen one. This book was very valuable in preparing me to get the job done. It's well organized with none of the usual excesses of the usual 800 page computer book.

It makes for an excellent introductory book.

I'm a DBA and needed to understand a few technologies about SANs and I had no where to look, until I read the reviews about this book on Amazon and decided to trust most of the reviewers and boy were they right. Excellent, excellent material delivered in a way that non-storage Admins would understand. I wish it wasn't put under the 'Dummies' series though.