The complete "how-to guide" for maximizing the availability of enterprise systems.

Training, support, backup, and maintenance account for nearly 80 percent of the total cost of today's enterprise applications-and much of that money is spent trying to squeeze increased availability out of applications in spite of weak design and management processes. In High Availability, two leading IT experts bring together best practices for every people and process-related issue associated with maximizing application availability. The goal: to help enterprises dramatically improve the value of their strategic applications, without investing a dime more than necessary.

• Enhancing all four key elements of availability: reliability, recoverability, serviceability, and manageability
• Understanding how your users define availability
• Planning achievable service level agreements-and delivering on them
• Strategies for multiple platforms, from the mainframe to the desktop
• Lowering administrative costs through standardization and other techniques
• Redundancy, backup, fault tolerance, partitioning, automation, and other high availability solutions
• Leveraging availability features built into your existing hardware and operating systems

Discover how to create systems that will be easier to maintain, anticipate and prevent problems, and define ongoing availability strategies that account for business change. Whatever your IT role, whatever your IT architecture, this book can help you deliver the breakthrough availability levels your organization needs right now.

Recognising that the cost of implementation is only a small fraction of the total cost of owning a network, this book provides hands-on information for IT managers on how to manage and administer existing and mismanaged systems.