0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
High availability for beginners, 2008-04-10
This book does a very good job in explaining principles of high availability from organisationnal and technical point of view. It deserves 5 stars in case the reader doesn't have any previous knowledge about high availability architecture and principles.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Exactly what I was looking for, 2007-10-31
This book describes how to achieve higher availability for systems. The most important and useful aspect of this book, is that the entire book is written based on a cost to benefit curve. The cheapest, most beneficial solutions are presented first.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Good explanations, some product bias, 2007-03-09
I knew very little about High Availability (HA) before I read this book. Now I feel I can hold my own with the propeller-heads in the data center.
The book gives a thorough treatment of the subject. The explanations were good; the graphics add value but are a little basic; also there is some favorable bias towards Veritas who originally published the book. (Veritas has some high availability software and services you can buy.) But overall a definite keeper. I recommend it if you're interested in High Availability design and concepts.
1 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
More on the relationship between security issues and HA, 2004-04-13
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.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Even better than the first edition!, 2004-04-06
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.