Product Description

Data is the lifeblood of modern business, and modern data centers have extremely 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 centers using SANs and NAS. This book explains the similarities and differences of SANs and NAS to help you determine which, or both, of these complementing technologies are appropriate for your network. Preston exams 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. Whether you're a seasoned storage administrator or a network administrator charged with taking on this role, you'll find all the information you need to make informed architecture and data management decisions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64556 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

Review
"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

About the Author
Preston has specialized in designing backup and recovery systems for more then six years, and has designed such systems for many environments, both large and small. 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.

Customer Reviews

For IT Architects and Storage Administrators
If you are looking for an overview of SAN and NAS that is both technically informative and equitable, this is the book for you. I bought it to better understand NAS-SAN convergence trends and it was invaluable for that purpose.

As with most O'Reilly books, it doesn't underestimate the reader, yet still manages to cover all the bases from basic to bread-and-butter, and beyond. The prose style is casual but very precise and always clear.

I want to stress what an earlier reviewer pointed out: it is especially strong on real world backup and restore issues...which is MUCH more important and complex than is initially apparent.

If you are tasked with building a real-world storage infrastructure: read this book first. BTW, because my local B&N was out-of-stock, I paid extra to have [Amazon.com] expedite this slim volume, (grumbling all the way), and ended up happy as a clam about it. Best IT book investment I ever made.

Very Good treatment of the subject
If you are looking for a very concise examination of SAN and NAS technologies, this is the right book. While it is a fraction of the size of some other books on the topic, it is a to-the-point treatment of the major architectural components of each.
There is a lot of foundation info that is somewhat assumed and reviewed briefly, but the killer chapters are on backup and restore methodologies around these technologies.
This is not a disk array or fibre-channel switch product guide nor does it explain every last detail of SCSI commands. But if the need is to understand these technologies and their place in your infrastructure, this is a good work.
Well worth the purchase price.

Great book on san / nas concepts
This book is really good at bringing together a lot of different details together having it make sense. It has been a couple of years since I worked on SANs and reading this book really refreshed the concepts for me. W. Curtis Preston's writing style is very easy to follow as he usually adds in insightful side items to break up the book a bit. I was expecting a very well written book as I also read his backup & recovery book which I really enjoyed too. I reccomend this book to anyone who is starting to investigate san or nas solutions or wants to get a good solid starting point with those technologies.