Blueprints for High Availability

by Marcus, Evan; Stern, Hal

• ISBN13: 9780471430261
• ISBN10: 0471430269
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-19
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

Uses the same witty style with practical tips, lists, and Tales from the Field as the first edition Since the first edition, there has been a huge increase in the complexity and design requirements needed to make networks reliable and always available 24/7 Stresses the importance of data being instantly and reliably available, especially in these critical times when a network must be up round the clock Examines how companies look at all possible threats and risks to their enterprise data, from damage caused by a virus to loss of business-critical services

Author Biography

EVAN MARCUS is a Principal Engineer for VERITAS Software. With more than twelve years of experience in the field of high availability, he is a frequent speaker at industry technical conferences.

Table of Contents

Contents	p. vii
Preface	p. xix
For the Second Edition	p. xix
Preface from the First Edition	p. xxiv
About the Authors	p. xxxi
Introduction	p. 1
Why an Availability Book?	p. 2
Our Approach to the Problem	p. 3
What's Not Here	p. 4
Our Mission	p. 4
The Availability Index	p. 5
Summary	p. 6
Organization of the Book	p. 6
Key Points	p. 8
What to Measure	p. 9
Measuring Availability	p. 10
Failure Modes	p. 20
Confidence in Your Measurements	p. 28
Key Points	p. 30
The Value of Availability	p. 31
What Is High Availability?	p. 31
The Costs of Downtime	p. 34
The Value of Availability	p. 37
The Availability Continuum	p. 47
The Availability Index	p. 51
The Lifecycle of an Outage	p. 52
Key Points	p. 60
The Politics of Availability	p. 61
Beginning the Persuasion Process	p. 61
Your Audience	p. 69
Delivering the Message	p. 70
After the Message Is Delivered	p. 73
Key Points	p. 73
20 Key High Availability Design Principles	p. 75
Don't Be Cheap	p. 76
Assume Nothing	p. 77
Remove Single Points of Failure (SPOFs)	p. 78
Enforce Security	p. 79
Consolidate Your Servers	p. 81
Watch Your Speed	p. 82
Enforce Change Control	p. 83
Document Everything	p. 84
Employ Service Level Agreements	p. 87
Plan Ahead	p. 88
Test Everything	p. 89
Separate Your Environments	p. 90
Learn from History	p. 92
Design for Growth	p. 93
Choose Mature Software	p. 94
Choose Mature, Reliable Hardware	p. 95
Reuse Configurations	p. 97
Exploit External Resources	p. 98
One Problem, One Solution	p. 99
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple...)	p. 101
Key Points	p. 104
Backups and Restores	p. 105
The Basic Rules for Backups	p. 106
Do Backups Really Offer High Availability?	p. 108
What Should Get Backed Up?	p. 109
Backup Software	p. 111
Backup Performance	p. 115
Backup Styles	p. 125
Handling Backup Tapes and Data	p. 141
Restores	p. 145
Summary	p. 147
Key Points	p. 148
Highly Available Data Management	p. 149
Four Fundamental Truths	p. 150
Six Independent Layers of Data Storage and Management	p. 152
Disk Hardware and Connectivity Terminology	p. 153
RAID Technology	p. 161
Disk Space and Filesystems	p. 176
Key Points	p. 182
SAN, NAS, and Virtualization	p. 183
Storage Area Networks (SANs)	p. 184
Network-Attached Storage (NAS)	p. 190
SAN or NAS: Which Is Better?	p. 191
Storage Virtualization	p. 196
Key Points	p. 202
Networking	p. 203
Network Failure Taxonomy	p. 204
Building Redundant Networks	p. 214
Load Balancing and Network Redirection	p. 228
Dynamic IP Addresses	p. 232
Network Service Reliability	p. 232
Key Points	p. 240
Data Centers and the Local Environment	p. 241
Data Centers	p. 242
Electricity	p. 252
Cabling	p. 255
Cooling and Environmental Issues	p. 257
System Naming Conventions	p. 259
Key Points	p. 261
People and Processes	p. 263
System Management and Modifications	p. 264
Vendor Management	p. 271
Security	p. 277
Documentation	p. 280
System Administrators	p. 284
Internal Escalation	p. 287
Key Points	p. 290
Clients and Consumers	p. 291
Hardening Enterprise Clients	p. 292
Tolerating Data Service Failures	p. 296
Key Points	p. 302
Application Design	p. 303
Application Recovery Overview	p. 304
Application Recovery from System Failures	p. 309
Internal Application Failures	p. 316
Developer Hygiene	p. 319
Process Replication	p. 326
Assume Nothing, Manage Everything	p. 330
Key Points	p. 331
Data and Web Services	p. 333
Network File System Services	p. 334
Database Servers	p. 342
Redundancy and Availability	p. 349
Web-Based Services Reliability	p. 351
Key Points	p. 359
Local Clustering and Failover	p. 361
A Brief and Incomplete History of Clustering	p. 362
Server Failures and Failover	p. 365
Logical, Application-centric Thinking	p. 367
Failover Requirements	p. 369
Larger Clusters	p. 385
Key Points	p. 386
Failover Management and Issues	p. 387
Failover Management Software (FMS)	p. 388
Component Monitoring	p. 389
Time to Manual Failover	p. 393
Homemade Failover Software or Commercial Software?	p. 395
Commercial Failover Management Software	p. 397
When Good Failovers Go Bad	p. 398
Verification and Testing	p. 404
Managing Failovers	p. 408
Other Clustering Topics	p. 411
Key Points	p. 414
Failover Configurations	p. 415
Two-Node Failover Configurations	p. 416
Service Group Failover	p. 425
Larger Cluster Configurations	p. 426
How Large Should Clusters Be?	p. 430
Key Points	p. 431
Data Replication	p. 433
What Is Replication?	p. 434
Why Replicate?	p. 435
Two Categories of Replication Types	p. 435
Other Thoughts on Replication	p. 458
Key Points	p. 463
Virtual Machines and Resource Management	p. 465
Partitions and Domains: System-Level VMs	p. 466
Containers and Jails: OS Level VMs	p. 468
Resource Management	p. 469
Key Points	p. 471
The Disaster Recovery Plan	p. 473
Should You Worry about DR?	p. 474
Three Primary Goals of a DR Plan	p. 475
What Goes into a Good DR Plan	p. 476
Preparing to Build the DR Plan	p. 477
Choosing a DR Site	p. 484
Distributing the DR Plan	p. 488
The Plan's Audience	p. 490
Timelines	p. 492
Team Assignments	p. 493
How Many Different Plans?	p. 495
Shared DR Sites	p. 496
Equipping the DR Site	p. 498
Is Your Plan Any Good?	p. 500
Three Types of Exercises	p. 507
The Effects of a Disaster on People	p. 509
Key Points	p. 512
A Resilient Enterprise*	p. 513
The New York Board of Trade	p. 514
Summary	p. 539
A Brief Look Ahead	p. 541
iSCSI	p. 541
InfiniBand	p. 542
Global Filesystem Undo	p. 543
Grid Computing	p. 545
Blade Computing	p. 547
Global Storage Repository	p. 548
Autonomic and Policy-Based Computing	p. 549
Intermediation	p. 551
Software Quality and Byzantine Reliability	p. 552
Business Continuity	p. 553
Key Points	p. 554
Parting Shots	p. 555
How We Got Here	p. 555
Index	p. 559
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