Expert techniques for designing your system to achieve maximum availability and predictable downtime<br><br>With your company's reputation and profits at stake, downtime on your 24/7 web site is not an option, nor is poor application performance. Now in its second edition, this authoritative book provides you with the design blueprints to maximize your system availability.<br><br>Striking a balance between costs and benefits, the authors show you all of the elements of your computer system that can fail-as well as ways to assess their reliability and attain resiliency and high availability for each one. A unique feature is "Tales from the Field," a collection of true-to-life experiences that will help you avoid mistakes and deploy your system with confidence.<br><br>Learn how to design your system to limit the impact of such problems as computer viruses, natural disasters, or the corruption of critical files and discover how to:<br>* Implement effective backup-and-restore and tape management strategies<br>* Arrange disks and disk arrays to avoid downtime caused by inevitable failures<br>* Utilize technologies such as Storage Area Networks (SANs), Network Attached Storage (NAS), Virtualization, and clustering <br>* Achieve effective application recovery after any part of the system has failed<br>* Replicate critical data to remote systems across a network