software design

One of the most interesting things about this book is that it treats the subject of availability as more then just a technology issue. It goes into areas such aas basic good systems admin practices, Physical placement of equipment, building and facility services. Availabilty is more then just Raid disks, HA software and redundant hardware. They do a very good job explaining all aspects of HA, and giving interesting real world examples in thier short interludes. The new last chapters adds a lot of relevence, exploring sept 11th and its effect on trading. A good informative read.

An excellent overview of high availability techniques. Starts with "why and how much HA do you need", and goes all the way through the hardware and design side of HA.

Doesn't describe any product in details, the authors explicitly refrain from doing so. Instead, the book makes you think the right way by pointing at the actual problems and offering actual decisions. Upon reading this book you can easily answer the question "what can we do to make it work", not "what brand of server should we buy".

Covers HA theory, redundant hardware, redundant systems design, failover techniques, replication, backups, procedures, disaster recovery.

The only thing that I didn't like and still can remember (a year later that I've read it), is that in my opinion the authors should stay totally clear off the "how to write a stable software" side of HA. There is like 2 pages of that, and it doesn't sound like anything sane.

Clear language. Solid visual design. Lots of (fun and) real-life samples. See the title of the review.

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.