Review of ‘Data Center Fundamentals’

TBR writes “Aimed principally at those interested in the networking infrastructure of server farms and other data centres, this is a big book in every sense. Firstly there’s the sheer volume of material: 5 parts, 22 chapters, 6 appendices, 1064 pages. Then there’s the range of material, from an over-view of data centres and server farms, to security, load balancing, application servers, network protocols, DNS, HTML and more.

The book is organised in four parts. The first part provides an introduction to server farms, starting with chapters on an overview of the data centre and then moving on to chapters that look at server architecture, application architectures (including middleware), data centre topologies, an overview of security and finally a chapter on a server load-balancing overview. This focus on this section of the book is to provide high-level views of a wide range of topics. The aim is to give a strong basic introduction to material that can be tackled in more detail in later sections of the book. These six chapters work very well and could well have made a book on their own.

In part two of the book the networking focus is more predominant. This section of the book looks at server farm protocols – from IP, TCP and UDP through to HTTP, SSL, TLS, DNS and more. The emphasis is a lot more technical, but like the rest of the book the material is well handled. The text is consistently clear, well-presented and illustrated with plenty of diagrams, screen shots and schematics. The book is very well designed, which is a real bonus.”