Drawing on his extensive technical and managerial experience at telecom/networking providers and financial companies, Minoli enlightens senior managers and other decision-makers on designing and managing cost-effective, state-of-the-art information technology (IT) infrastructures and data centers. First he surveys enterprise architecture planning goals, roles, mechanisms, and business modeling and application development via Service- Oriented Architecture (SOA) modeling. Part II focuses on infrastructure technologies including high-speed communications mechanisms (e.g., SANs, Gigabit Ethernet, metro Ethernet); Internet and WAN communication technologies; network virtualization via SOA modeling; and grid computing and server virtualization. The text helpfully includes diagrams of IT conceptual frameworks and models, and a glossary. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)