<p>The intent of this book is to bring readers a straight-forward, crisp, and practical approach to designing world-class high-availability systems from the ground up, i.e., systems in which high availability is a critical design element and differentiator, as well as a customer requirement. Such systems include but are not limited to Telecom, Automotive, Medical, Manufacturing, Aerospace, Financial, and other Information Systems, which typically consist of high reliability hardware, embedded and off-the-shelf software, multi-site, multi-threaded distributed processing environments, complex real time applications, and demanding performance requirements.<br />Though high availability and reliability are typically “must-haves” and taken for granted, designing such systems is usually complex and difficult to implement for a variety of reasons and can take many iterations involving significant cost and effort. This book attempts to bring together different practical techniques used in the industry to successfully design, predict, and deploy high availability systems while reducing costs.</p>