Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0 is an introduction to architecting highly available systems with Sun servers, storage, and the Sun Cluster 3.0 software.

Three recurring themes are used throughout the book: failures, synchronization, and arbitration. These themes occur throughout all levels of systems design. The first chapter deals with understanding their relationships and recognizing failure modes associated with synchronization and arbitration. The second and third chapters review the building blocks and describe the Sun Cluster 3.0 software environment in detail. The remaining chapters discuss management servers and provide hypothetical case studies in which enterprise solutions are designed using Sun technologies. Appendices provide a checklist for designing clustered solutions, additional information on Sun technologies used in many different types of clusters, guidelines for data center design best practices, and a brief description of some failure analysis tools used by Sun systems designers and architects.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Richard Elling is the Chief Architect for Enterprise Engineering at Sun Microsystems in San Diego, California. Richard had been a field systems engineer at Sun for five years. He was the Sun Worldwide Field Systems Engineer of the Year in 1996. Prior to working at Sun, he was the Manager of Network Support for the College of Engineering at Auburn University, a design engineer for a startup microelectronics company, and worked for NASA doing electronic design and experiments integration for Space Shuttle missions.

Tim Read is a Lead Consultant for the High End Systems Group in Sun UK's Joint Technology Organization. Since 1985 he has worked in the UK computer industry, joining Sun in 1990. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics with Astrophysics from Birmingham University. As part of his undergraduate studies, Tim studied clusters of suns; now he teaches and writes about Sun Clusters.