Those interested in learning what high availability really means and entails should read this book and understand it thoroughly. The tips and knowledge one can glean from this book is awesome just for the TCP/IP and network portions of the book and it truly does lead you down the path to large scale success. While every section of the book is almost a book of it's own (it is an extremely long book) and could likely get sold as such, this book takes head on the task of trying to cram into it every aspect you would need to delve into a world made up of fully redundant server and network architecture. As a good example, DNS, while reasonably simple and elegant has many facets to it that if improperly configured or understood can be a make or break item in many data centers. Security is yet another aspect that can either help or hurt a company and it's client base. If either of these is something you want to ensure is part of your considerations when building a data center then this is likely a book right up your alley. The Cryptography section is perfect for those looking to help out a bit in their search for a CISSP and the section on layer 2 and layer 3 functions is almost invaluable to anyone in a network administration field.

Lastly the aspect of this book that most astounded me was the depth that it was able to attain in such a short book. With the stress of putting together a book so focused on redundancy it is hard to believe as much foundation material made it into this book as it did. The authors made sure to try to cover every aspect of the underlying technology beneath every higher level solution they proposed.
This book is a must read for anyone interested in networking and server support regardless of being in a true "Data Center". Review By:  Todd Keller - Senior VoIP/Data Engineer