Excellent Book for Datacenter networks

This book seems to be a good reference for IT staff who want
to better understand networking in the datacenter edge segment.
This is the only networking book that I found that covers issues
related to servers, network interface cards and the access
switches and routers.

The book covers important concepts in depth that are not found
anywhere else. For example ch 3 describes how TCP tunable
variables are grouped into functions such as flow control,
congestion control and how they work. In particular this
chapter describes how the data packets are impacted by
the tcp tunable variables, using the Solaris implementation as
example. I always see suggested tunable recommendations in
the manuals, but they never explain how they work. This book
is the first place where I was finally able to understand
how these TCP tunables work. There is also a free sun blueprint
available, that looks like came right out of this book, which
is also available from informIT. It is not only an excellent
description of how tcp tunables work, but helpful when
optimizing performance.


Ch 5 offered some good insights on how the gigabit ethernet
device driver worked. I did not find this anywhere else.
P.139 to 169 contained really nice insights on how the
gigabit ethernet driver works, including the unique
features of the NIC and driver, including a nice description of
how packets are recieved and transmitted. This RX TX architecture
on p.145 and related are not available anywhere else and was
clearly written by an expert who probably wrote the driver
himself. These days marketing staff are the ones writing
print.

Ch 6 and 7 was very useful to us, in the sense it gave us
a great starting point for greenfield deployments of web
based applications. We were able to leverage the designs and
customize for our purposes. On p.326 I found the configs very
useful. For example a desc on how to tie in the port availability to vrrp, allowing the router with the most available ports or links to the servers to be promoted to Master. It is insights like these that IT staff like myself,
found to be very helpful and cleared up a few grey areas.


In summary, this book is probably intended for IT datacenter staff who manage and design networks that fall into to the access layer segment. I want to understand how all the pieces work and inter relate, from the tcp stack, to network interface card to the L2 access switch(various patterns are offered) to the L3 default router(vrrp), appliances such as SSL, loadbalancing etc. This is the only book I found that actually
compared several Load Balancers, Firewalls and SSL appliances and
described how they work. I was able to understand and use it in
our production network!

This is pretty much the material required to deploy web based applications into a network infrastructure.


Dave

Other Reviews

• Excellent Book for Datacenter networks
• A complilation of what you can find on the Internet for free