Data is the lifeblood of modern business, and modern data centres have demanding requirements for size, speed, and reliability. Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) allow organizations to manage and back up huge file systems quickly, thereby keeping their lifeblood flowing. W. Curtis Preston's insightful book takes you through the ins and outs of building and managing large data centres using SANs and NAS. Network administrators are aware that multi-terabyte data stores are common and petabyte data stores are starting to appear. Given this much data, how can they ensure that it is available all the time, that access times and throughput are reasonable, and that the data can be backed up and restored in a timely manner? SANs and NAS provide solutions that help work through these problems, with special attention to the difficulty of backing up huge data stores. This book explains the similarities and differences of SANs and NAS to help determine which, or both, of these complementing technologies are appropriate for your network. Using SANs, for instance, is a way to share multiple devices (tape drives and disk drives) for storage, while NAS is a means for centrally storing files so they can be shared. Preston examines each technology with a vendor neutral approach, starting with the building blocks of a SAN and how they can be assembled for effective storage solutions. He covers day-to-day management and backup and recovery for both SANs and NAS in detail.

About the Author
W. Curtis Preston has specialized in designing backup and recovery systems for over eight years, and has designed such systems for many environments, both large and small. The first environment that Curtis was responsible for went from 7 small servers to 250 large servers in just over two years, running Oracle, Informix, and Sybase databases and five versions of Unix. He started managing this environment with homegrown utilities and eventually installed the first of many commercial backup utilities. His passion for backup and recovery began with managing the data growth of this 24x7, mission-critical environment. Having designed backup systems for environments with small budgets, Curtis has developed a number of freely available tools, including ones that perform live backups of Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. He has ported these tools to a number of environments, including Linux, and they are running at companies around the world. Curtis is now the owner of Storage Designs, a consulting company dedicated entirely to selecting, designing, implementing, and auditing storage systems. He is also the webmaster of www.backupcentral.com.

Reviews
"I can say this book is a must for any person engaged in storage administration." - Virantha Mendes, news@UK "In true O'Reilly style, Preston has managed to cover almost every aspects of network-based storage within two-hundred pages, without cutting back on detail or avoiding more complex configurations which people may need." Verdict: The definitive guide for administrators and builders of network storage systems and management solutions -9/10 LinuxFormat, August 2002



Book Information
ISBN 9780596001537
Author W Curtis Preston
Format Paperback
Page Count 205
Imprint O'Reilly Media
Publisher O'Reilly Media