SummaryFor many organizations, a loss of service is just as devastating as a loss of information. The odds of service interruption or information loss decrease significantly if no single points of failure exist. Some interesting and powerful technologies exist that can keep mission-critical services available even in the face of a catastrophic disaster. Key Points
- Recovering from a network catastrophe takes time.
- Sooner or later, a major system failure will happen.
- A truly redundant information system contains no single points of failure.
- Maintaining high availability becomes more difficult and more expensive as systems increase in size.
Connections
Ensuring availability is a challenge for any organization, large or small. There is much more to ensuring availability than making sure data is backed up. The following chapters cover a variety of methods to help keep data ready and waiting at all times:
- RAID introduces technique for using multiple synchronized hard
drives to increase performance and/or reliability.
- Clustering describes a technology that allows a system to remain
operational if its hardware or software fails by replicating its running processes on a simultaneous system in real time.
- Backup Systems actually perform two functions, copying critical
data to another location and enabling the swift and painless recovery of the backed up data.
- Distributed Computing (web bonus) is used to obtain unprecedented power, availability and capacity by getting many machines to work together on a problem.
- Rollout Systems (web bonus) explores tools that enable updates or installations to occur over networks, to many nodes at the same time.
More Information
The above information is an excerpt from "Network Security Illustrated," published by McGraw-Hill and available from amazon.com, as well as your local bookstore. The book goes into much greater depth on this topic. To learn more about the book and what it covers, click here.
Below, you'll find links to online resources that supplement this portion of the book.
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