Expert techniques for designing your system to achieve maximum availability and predictable downtime 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. 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. 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: Implement effective backup-and-restore and tape management strategies Arrange disks and disk arrays to avoid downtime caused by inevitable failures Utilize technologies such as Storage Area Networks (SANs), Network Attached Storage (NAS), Virtualization, and clustering Achieve effective application recovery after any part of the system has failed Replicate critical data to remote systems across a network