Breaking the Availability Barrier: Volume II

Achieving Century Uptimes with Active/Active Systems

  Volume II extends the theoretical topics covered in Volume I and covers significant issues and technologies related to active/active architectures, including availability calculations, redundant reliable networks, distributed databases, total cost of ownership, and node failures. Volume III is a companion to Volume II and contains practical examples and case studies for actually building active/active systems based upon the principles covered in Volumes I and II.

Purchase Breaking the Availability Barrier, Volume II (2007: ISBN 978-1-4343-1604-2)

About Volumes II and III

If you could configure your current system to:

• Provide century MTBFs,
• affect only a subset of users upon a failure,
• recover from any failure in subseconds to seconds,
• lose little if any data as the result of a failure,
• eliminate planned downtime,
• achieve disaster tolerance,
• use all available capacity,
• load balance at will,
• be easily expandable,
• all with no application changes and at little or no additional cost,
• …wouldn’t you be interested?

We think so, and that is what this book is all about. Active/active systems can and do provide these benefits.

An active/active system is a network of independent processing nodes cooperating in a common application. Should a node fail, one only needs to switch over that node’s users to a surviving node. Recovery is in subseconds to seconds.

You will learn from this book how to build systems with extreme availabilities that will perform for centuries without any downtime. It is for the IT executives who must reduce the downtime of their systems, for the system architects who are charged with significantly improving the availability of their systems, and for the operations staff who must manage and operate these systems.

About the Authors

The authors of the book, Dr. Bill Highleyman, Paul J. Holenstein, and Dr. Bruce Holenstein, have a combined experience of over 100 years in the implementation of fault-tolerant, highly available computing systems. This experience ranges from the early days of custom redundant systems to today’s fault-tolerant offerings from HPE NonStop and Stratus. Learn more about the authors.

Other Volumes Available:

• Breaking the Availability Barrier: Volume I
• Breaking the Availability Barrier: Volume III