High Availability: Design, Techniques, and Processes - Hardcover

Piedad, Floyd; Hawkins, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0130962880 ISBN 13: 9780130962881

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2000

Synopsis

Training, systems support, backup and maintenance account for nearly 80% of the total cost of today's enterprise applications -- and much of that money is spent trying to squeeze increased availability out of applications in spite of weak design and management processes. In High Availability: Design, Techniques and Processes, two leading IT experts bring together "best practices" for every people and process-related issue associated with maximizing application availability. The goal: to help enterprises dramatically improve the value of their strategic applications, without spending more money. Using extensive real-world examples and scenarios, the authors cover the entire application lifecycle. Learn how to design systems that will be easier to maintain; ensure that new systems will not increase in cost later due to problems you could have anticipated; and plan long-term availability strategies. Discover how to improve redundancy, increase standardization, simplify backups, and much more. These strategies and techniques are applicable to any IT professional, at any level, in any architecture, from traditional mainframes through client/server to leading-edge n-tier environments. For all IT professionals, including system architects, project managers, administrators, software developers and software engineers.

About this title

About the Author

FLOYD PIEDAD is President of AKAsia Services Corporation, a leading Internet services company based in Manila, the Philippines.

MICHAEL HAWKINS is an IT management consultant who specializes in implementing and managing large IT infrastructures for companies throughout Asia and North America.

From the Back Cover

The complete "how-to guide" for maximizing the availability of enterprise systems.

Training, support, backup, and maintenance account for nearly 80 percent of the total cost of today's enterprise applications-and much of that money is spent trying to squeeze increased availability out of applications in spite of weak design and management processes. In High Availability, two leading IT experts bring together best practices for every people and process-related issue associated with maximizing application availability. The goal: to help enterprises dramatically improve the value of their strategic applications, without investing a dime more than necessary.

• Enhancing all four key elements of availability: reliability, recoverability, serviceability, and manageability
• Understanding how your users define availability
• Planning achievable service level agreements-and delivering on them
• Strategies for multiple platforms, from the mainframe to the desktop
• Lowering administrative costs through standardization and other techniques
• Redundancy, backup, fault tolerance, partitioning, automation, and other high availability solutions
• Leveraging availability features built into your existing hardware and operating systems

Discover how to create systems that will be easier to maintain, anticipate and prevent problems, and define ongoing availability strategies that account for business change. Whatever your IT role, whatever your IT architecture, this book can help you deliver the breakthrough availability levels your organization needs right now.

From the Inside Flap

Introduction

Back when the mainframe ruled the world, information technology (IT) practitioners quickly learned the value of a well-managed system. They understood the value of managing problems, changes, and other issues confronting large, mission-critical computer systems running an organization's most sensitive business functions.

When the popularity of mainframes waned in favor of less costly midrange and PC systems, IT organizations were caught in the frenzy of developing and deploying new business applications with breakneck speed. Suddenly, more computing power was available to end users, who wanted to accomplish more with it than ever before. The corporate information system grew in scope, use, and importance, with no end in sight.

Now that the dust has settled somewhat, both the IT organization and the leaders of the business recognize that an unmanaged state-of-the-art computer system can be as bad as having none at all. Symptoms of this problem with unmanaged systems manifest themselves in ballooning IT costs, overworked and demoralized IT staff, and user dissatisfaction.

This book demonstrates how to deliver maximum system availability and manageability throughout a computer system's lifecycle, from design through implementation and maintenance. We review every key technique for simplifying the management and maintenance of computer systems - including redundancy, standardization, backups, and many more. We discuss practical means of implementing these techniques to make your current and future systems far less prone to outages.

We cover technical and management issues, since you cannot achieve long-term system availability and manageability solutions without addressing both. We have written this book to benefit everyone in the IT organization. Technical staff will find practical operational solutions that can be implemented immediately. IT management will gain a better perspective of the end-to-end and interrelated requirements of running an IT shop. And Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and other senior IT executives will find forward-looking strategies for enhancing the IT infrastructure and its contribution to the corporate bottom line.

You can manage systems better if you design them with high systems availability in mind. This book will show you how to address your system availability problems, from start to finish.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0130962880
• ISBN 13: 9780130962881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286