Building High Availability Windows Server™ 2003 Solutions

Chapter 4. Highly Available Networks

Introduction

Without a backbone, most systems, both organic and mechanic, cannot exist. The backbone in the world of computers and software is the network. When designing highly available systems, whether they are load-balanced, failover, SANs, or simply redundant systems, a weak or flimsy backbone, an unstable or poorly designed network, presents the greatest risk to availability. If the hosts cannot communicate with each other, they are useless.

This chapter focuses on building a solid network and backbone before any high-performance, highly available architecture is put in place with respect to the actual systems themselves. We discuss backbone design for availability and scalability, network interface cards, ...