My book is now available for preorder – Data Protection for the Virtual Data Center

There is something very surreal in finding your name on Amazon.com … so I just had to share it.  

Jason's Book - Data Protection for Virtual Datacenters

Description (from publisher):

Essential information on how to protect data in virtual environments!

Virtualization is changing the data center architecture and as a result, data protection is is quickly evolving as well. This unique book, written by an industry expert with over eighteen years of data storage/backup experience, shows you how to approach, protect, and manage data in a virtualized environment. You’ll get up to speed on data protection problems, explore the data protection technologies available today, see how to adapt to virtualization, and more. The book uses a "good, better, best" approach, exploring best practices for backup, high availability, disaster recovery, business continuity, and more.

  • Covers best practices and essential information on protecting data in virtualized enterprise environments
  • Shows you how to approach, protect, and manage data while also meeting such challenges as return on investment, existing service level agreements (SLAs), and more
  • Helps system and design architects understand data protection issues and technologies in advance, so they can design systems to meet the challenges
  • Explains how to make absolutely critical services such as file services and e-mail more available without sacrificing protection
  • Offers best practices and solutions for backup, availability, disaster recovery, and others

This is a must-have guide for any Windows server and application administrator who is charged with data recovery and maintaining higher uptimes.

Wow … that makes me want to buy one too – and I am writing it.  <grin>

Description (from me):

I have been a “backup and availability guy” for most of my nearly 20 years in IT.  And over that time, I have acquired a library of books where I only needed the data protection or availability chapters.   Similarly, I have gone to a lot of training conferences, where I bounced across tracks just to understand how to keep my overall environment running and protected – e.g. the only Exchange session I might attend was the failover class.

This book is written for IT Professionals and their managers who already have a Windows infrastructure – and want to make it better.

If you are familiar with Microsoft’s Core Infrastructure Optimization initiatives, think of this as a what/why/how deployment handbook for data protection and availability.

Some of the topics include:

  • Measuring Risk with RPO, RTO, SLA, BIA, TCO and ROI
  • Storage-, Host- and Application-based availability
  • Disk-, Tape- and Cloud-based protection
  • File Serving
  • Windows Clustering
  • Exchange CCR, SCR and DAG
  • Database Mirroring and Failover
  • Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
  • How virtualization changes the game – for better and worse

And as for the “virtual datacenter” in the title – it absolutely covers things from the perspective of server virtualization as a probable component of your infrastructure.  But there is a second meaning.  I grew up supporting small and medium sized businesses (SMB) and have always been passionate around the idea that SMB’s needed protection and availability as much, if not more, than some enterprises – since they are less tolerant to service outages, usually have less cash reserves on hand during a crisis, and may not have the same level of IT skills on-site, which exacerbates their issues because now they have to pay someone else while they are losing money being offline.   SMB’s may only have 3-10 servers in some back room, but to them, that is their virtual “data center”.   This book is hopefully for them, too.

The book is planned to debut by TechEd US 2010 … and I have partnered with some great friends and subject experts to make each chapter as real as it gets.

Me and my publisher would love to hear if we are hitting the right topics, so please comment to this post or email me from the blog.

As always, for the blog … and hopefully the book … Thanks for reading.

Jason

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