537 pages | 157 B/W Illus.
This book starts with the basic premise that a service is comprised of the 3Ps—products, processes, and people. Moreover, these entities and their sub-entities interlink to support the services that end users require to run and support a business. This widens the scope of any availability design far beyond hardware and software. It also increases the potential for service failure for reasons beyond just hardware and software; the concept of logical outages.
High Availability IT Services details the considerations for designing and running highly available "services" and not just the systems infrastructure that supports those services. Providing an overview of virtualization and cloud computing, it supplies a detailed look at availability, redundancy, fault tolerance, and security. It also stresses the importance of human factors.
The book starts off by providing an availability primer and detailing the reasons why you need to be concerned with high availability. Next, it outlines the theory of reliability and availability and the elements of actual practices in this high availability (HA) area, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Change Management.
Examining what the major hardware and software vendors have to offer in the HA world, the book considers the ubiquitous world of clouds and virtualization as well as the availability considerations they present.
The book examines high availability concepts and architectures such as reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS); clusters; grids; and redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID) storage. It also covers the role of security in providing high availability, cluster offerings, emergent Linux clusters, online transaction processing (OLTP), and relational databases.
Do You Know. . .?
Availability Drivers in Flux: What Percentage of Business Is Critical?
Historical View of Availability: The First 7 × 24 Requirements?
Downtime: Who or What Is to Blame?
Why Is an SLA Important?
HA Costs Money So Why Bother?
Pandemics? Disaster Waiting to Happen?
Be Prepared for Big Brother!
SLA: How Do We Quantify Availability?
HA Plan B: What’s That?
What? IT Problem Recovery without IT?
Disasters Are Rare . . . Aren’t They?
Who Are the Risk Stakeholders?
Dr. Terry Critchley is a retired IT consultant living near Manchester in the United Kingdom. He studied physics at the Manchester University (using some of Rutherford's original equipment!), gained an Honours degree in physics, and 5 years later with a PhD in nuclear physics. He then joined IBM as a Systems Engineer and spent 24 years there in a variety of accounts and specializations, later served in Oracle for 3 years. Terry joined his last company, Sun Microsystems in 1996 and left there in 2001, after planning and running the Sun European Y2000 education, and then spent a year at a major UK bank.
In 1993 he initiated and coauthored a book on Open Systems for the British Computer Society (Open Systems: The Reality) and has recently written this book IT Services High Availability. He is also mining swathes of his old material for his next book, Service Performance and Management.