Blueprints for High Availability: Designing Resilient Distributed Systems: Amazon.ca: Evan Marcus, Hal Stern: Books

Product Description

Book Description

Bestselling authors deliver an authoritative, hands-on book of tools for maintaining constant system availability.

Reliability is not a quality that can simply be purchased; instead, it needs to be engineered into a system or product. Here is the only top-to-bottom guide available for the assessment, design, implementation, and testing of a system for 100% reliability. Renowned authors Evan Marcus and Hal Stern provide readers with a series of practical blueprints, disciplines, and processes for assessing risks of a distributed system, assigning costs and selecting appropriate reliability levels, and designing and testing solutions without excessive downtime.

From the Back Cover

"Rely on this book for information on the technologies and methods you'll need to design and implement high-availability systems...It will help you transform the vision of always-on networks into a reality."--Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Novell Corporation

Your system will crash! The reason could be something as complex as network congestion or something as mundane as an operating system fault. The good news is that there are steps you can take to maximize your system availability and prevent serious downtime. This authoritative book will provide you with the tools to deploy a system with confidence. The authors guide you through the building of a network that runs with high availability, resiliency, and predictability. They clearly show you how to assess the elements of a system that can fail, select the appropriate level of reliability, and provide steps for designing, implementing, and testing your solution to reduce downtime to a minimum. All the while, they help you determine how much you can afford to spend by balancing costs and benefits. This book of practical, hands-on blueprints:

* Examines what can go wrong with the various components of your system
* Provides twenty key system design principles for attaining resilience and high availability
* Discusses how to arrange disks and disk arrays for protection against hardware failures
* Looks at failovers, the software that manages them, and sorts through the myriad of different failover configurations
* Provides techniques for improving network reliability and redundancy
* Reviews techniques for replicating data and applications to other systems across a network
* Offers guidance on application recovery
* Examines Disaster Recovery

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
Throughout this book we use the terms "resiliency" in terms of overall system availability. Read the first page

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Concordance

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Customer Reviews

18 Reviews

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
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Average Customer Review

4.7 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews)

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4.0 out of 5 stars More on the relationship between security issues and HA, April 13 2004

By

Onetit Femme (NY, NY . . .) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blueprints for High Availability (Paperback)

as I was reading this otherwise excellent book, I noticed that there was a very important theme (to my understanding), which wasn't honored enough attention; namely, issues relating to the 'Secure Socket Layer' protocol and availability, which directly translates to money coming your or someone else's way.

How does it affect the HA and your web applications architecture? SSL Certificates in a HA setting? . . . etc. All diagrams would present the web farm directly facing the internet!?

I even stopped reading and went to the index looking for it and found that there were indeed two -very basic- blurbs on it on pages 301 and 352.

I know security is a theme by itself, but the relationship between security issues and HA is way too fundamental to simply skim over them. As a matter of fact I would say that number one issue affecting HA is security.

Also the book has a very SA oriented (am I talking about another book already? ;-)) style. I would like to read a little more about 'the Physics' of it. For example, cosmic rays' (I am not joking), like neutrinos, influence on the proper/stable functioning of computers is greater than the, comparatively speaking, very anomalous 'split brain' types of errors and more on, electric accidents, the effective use of ECC memory. Should it go in the Web servers, too, in addition to the data centers? Why?

Cabling and electromagnetic inductance issues are mentioned in the 'Tales from the Field', but I could see some people expecting a more rounding explanation/solution to the 'tales'. In the case in which they talk about a java web server people might have the impression that 'Java' or its use in a web server was wrong, which
I could tell was most probably not the case, but the use of JSP without specifying the sessions shouldn't be automatically created, which is the default many developers forget.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Even better than the first edition!, April 6 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Blueprints for High Availability (Paperback)

I bought the first edition of this book, and it became so dog-eared from everyone borrowing it that I was about to order another, when I saw there was a secodn edition. This one is even better that the first. If you need action items and you need set-up help for providing the kind of network your boss wants and needs, this is the book for you.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great book on system/data availability, Feb 29 2004

By

Ryan (Los Angels, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blueprints for High Availability (Paperback)

Very good coverage of HA issues. Many people get a warm fuzzy having one piece of kit that is "reliable" or "redundant". To get substantial gains in availability requires a more complete systems view. This book reviews many aspects, and paths that can be taken towards increasing availability. I heartily recommended this book.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Broad coverage for a broad audience
Hal and Evan have produced an excellent overview of the field of reliable computer systems which is useful to system administrators, system architects and to non-technical people... Read more

Published on Dec 31 2003 by simon_k

5.0 out of 5 stars If you are serious about HA....
.. you need this book (2nd edition). There are no products that provide availability for the entire enterprise. Read more

Published on Dec 29 2003 by Mark Fitzpatrick