Customer Reviews

Storage Networks Explained: Basics and Application of Fibre Channel SAN, NAS iSCSI and InfiniBand

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A very good translation of the german text. There are a few areas where the translation falters but overall excellent. This is not an implementation book. It's meant to be a general overview of the Storage Network universe. The authors focus on Fibre Channel SAN which is still dominant in large corporations and gaining popularity among mid level companies. The book does a good job of explaining the plus/minus of all the competing standards as well as giving an infrastructure map of each of the technology setups. If you want to understand the ABCs of Storage, your journey should start with this book.

This is one of the best books I've encountered in many years. What I like about it:
- Describes everything (using illustration) from file-systems and volume managers down to transport concepts like fibre channel, iSCSI, infiniband, VI
- Goes into concepts like mirroring, snapshots and other technologies in an easy to relate manner.

Despite the relatively high price, I give this book an A and would heartily recommend it. However this book is not for programmers or those intending to design things. Neither is it for sales/marketing folks who just want to know key buzzwords. Its more for technologists, CTOs and others interested in how things work with regards storage networking.

As a reader of Wiley books since my undergraduate days, many years ago, I have come to respect and enjoy their high quality, and have, over the years, purchased and recommended quite a few, both for the companies I've worked with and for my personal professional library.

It is therefore a deep disappointment for me to read "Storage Networks Explained", originally published in German, and translated to English in 2004.

My disappointment is not with the technical contents - the book was obviously written by experts in the field, and give a complete (if slightly dated) review of the field of storage networks. In terms of contents, my expectations are fulfilled. However, the translation of the book from the original was done in a sub-standard manner, resulting in an uncomfortable reading experience. All too often, my concentration was broken by having to re-read sentences and trying to understand what the original authors were trying to say in German, as the phrasing in English is awkward and unnatural at best, and ofter plainly wrong.

The information I needed was there, but getting it was made harder than necessary due to the poor translation and editing. A newer book that's up-to-date and even a bit better in terms of style and ease of reading will well-deservedly remainder all the copies of this work. Until such a book is out, non-German speakers who wish to get a decent overview of the field will have to struggle with this.

i entered into the arena of Storage in early 2007, though i used to work on hard drives & tape since 2001, SAN was something new to me.

I was looking out for a book which could be self explanatory and be easier to understand. Stoage Networks explained is a very handy book for me because it explains the concepts of SAN beautifully and very importantly its simpler to understand.

I beleive that every penny i invested in it is worth it, cause in my currency it costed me about 6000 Rupees. In return I stood first in my training batch and i knew where the inspiration came from. Thank you Troppens,Muller and Erkens for making my life and job simpler.

Some of the information in this book is a little out of date, it would be nice if there was a new revision. Other than that, I've found this book to be very helpful. I haven't found any of the language problems that some of the other reviewers mentioned, although I haven't read it cover-to-cover. I'm very pleased with this book and would purchase it again.

Honestly. Please spend your money wisely. For just under 100 bucks you get a book with about 300 pages which includes a diagram on just about every page. The referenced diagrams are very poorly explained. If you enjoy reading functional requirement documents, this book is definitely for you. I've read the reviews giving praise to this book, yet nothing to be said about what they had learned. Tip! Checkout SAN for dummies.

Overall, this is the best storage book that you ever read .