Blueprints for High Availability

Messrs. Marcus and Stern have created a book that works for the seasoned sysadmin as well as the HA newbie. Frank depictions of case studies provide helpful insight into the many pitfalls of creating HA solutions. The "key points" sections at the end of each chapter provide quick and easy checkpoints should a reference refresher be required. Another excellent trait of this book is its readability and realistic approach to the HA "art". The mixture of pure philosophy tempered with daily reality provided me at least, with more certainty in finding the best overall balance of reliability, availability, and manageability vs. things like cost of ownership, etc.There is an excellent level of technical proficiency treated in the text as well. The hardcore bits and bytes folk won't be dissappointed by Mr. Stern's treatment various scenarios. The attention Mr. Marcus pays to higher level structural detail also makes you say occasionally, "gee i would have never thought of that.". (And even if you had, i doubt you would have been able to elaborate on it as humorously.) :)It's one of the few books i refer back to occasionally, (not so surprisingly, this goes for Mr. Stern's Managing NIS/NFS book as well). Overall, it's just an extremely invaluable book that's actually a good read as well. (love the "Tales from the field" blurbs). I don't believe there's any stone regarding HA left unturned by this book. Replication, DR, backup and restores...it's all there.I look forward to their next collaborative effort.

High availability is almost like the Holy Grail - believers know it exists, but getting it can be a quest. Not that it's an elusive, impossible-to-achieve objective - it's just expensive and the path to high availability is filled with challenges, blind alleys and the risk of spending money on the wrong things.This book covers every conceivable aspect of high availability, from application recovery to the [Zen] of service level agreements. The emphasis is on the underlying technologies, with a good deal of attention paid to processes and business considerations as well.There are two things that stand out about this book: it is comprehensive and the authors are in-the-trenches technical types who can actually write. It is obvious that the authors have stuggled with and mastered every technology and technique about which they have written. This is a refreshing change from the plethora of technical books written by professional writers who are assigned book projects because they have writing ability, but not necessarily any real technical background. So, in a world that is littered with books with no substance, this gem is definitely worth buying.I am not going to rehash the table of contents, which is readily available on this page - I will say that the authors gave each of the topics excellent treatment on a number of levels. First, they have deleved into the mechanics of each topic, they have shown the strengths and weaknesses of each, and in many cases, have provided anecdotes and real-life stories about their experiences with designing and implementing similar solutions. The anecdotal content follows a pattern: it points out problems and how the authors resolved those problems when they encountered them. These alone make the book invaluable, and increase the credibility of the authors.Who should read this book? Systems engineers and managers.Systems engineers will benefit from the wealth of technical information provided in the book, and will also benefit from the excellent explanations of underlying mechanics of how the various technologies and solution sets work. I am sure that most systems engineers will find the book's many anecdotes to be entertaining reading that imparts valuable information. Managers should read this book because it puts into perspective how various pieces of a high availability solution set fits together. It also provides a dose of reality that might just stop some "suit" from decreeing a technical direction without fully understanding the full set of issues and factors. This book will provide the issues and factors to managers in a readable manner.

I must first confess to being a colleague of sorts of Evan's--I work in the same company (VERITAS Software), but in a different part. I'll also confess to having bought the book (yes, I bought it) more out of curiosity than out of an immediate need for the information it contains. Having said that, I will go on to say that I am pleased with my purchase. This book is great, not because of the detail it contains in any one area, but because it tells you what all the areas are that you need to be concerned with if you're implementing a highly available system. Lots of books answer questions on how to implement this or that aspect of high availability; what's much less common is a book like this that you can use as a check list to see if you have all the bases covered. It doesn't go into great detail on any single topic, but it gives you enough meat to make informed decisions in the less technical areas (like staff, training, etc.) and to send you searching for more detail in the more technical areas (like backup, RAID, and clustering). I'll pay Evan and Hal another compliment. I own many more technical books than I have read. I didn't really expect to read this book, just because I don't read most of the books I buy all the way through. What I found, however, is that this book sort of creeps up on you. You read a little, and a little more. You put it down, only to pick it up later. The information is very well organized and chapters are self-contained. You can pretty much open it anywhere and have an informative read for 15 minutes, for an hour, or whatever time you have to give it. It's obvious that both authors bring lots of hands on experience to this book. The "Tales from the Field" anecdotal sidebars are worth the price of the book by themselves. I wish I could bring these guys to bear when I have HA problems. If I can't, I'll at least have their book at my side.

This is a superb book. Anyone who doesn't concern himself with availability ;-) shouldn't buy it, but the rest of us need the kind of clear-headed, on target, practical guidance that this book offers. Evan and Hal have done a wonderful job of presenting the issues and options for HA. This book isn't a "must have", it's a "must read"!

Finally a book that specifically discusses the very important topic of availability. The book discusses how to address each layer of an infrastructure from the data layer, network, application, etc. with an emphasis on availability requirements. I found it to be an excellent synthesis of all of the components of end-to-end availability. Anyone involved in Web Architecture and design will certainly find value in this book. My only criticism is that there are a few plugs specifically for Veritas but as a fan of their products it didn't bother me.