Preface
Networking Concepts and Technology: A Designer's Resource is a resource for network architects who must create solutions for emerging network environments in enterprise data centers. You'll find information on how to leverage Sun™ Open Network Environment (Sun ONE) technologies to create Services on Demand solutions as well as technical details about the networking internals. You'll also learn how to integrate your environment with advanced networking switching equipment, providing sophisticated Internet Protocol (IP) services beyond plain vanilla Layer 2 and Layer 3 routing. Based upon industry standards, expert knowledge, and hands-on experience, this book provides a detailed technical overview of the following:
Design of highly available, scalable, manageable gigabit network architectures with a focus on the server-to-switch tier. We will share key ingredients for successful deployments based on actual experiences.
Emerging IP services that vastly improve Sun ONE-based solutions, giving you a centralized source of concise information about these services, the benefits they provide, how to implement them, and where to use them. Example services include quality of service (QoS), server load balancing (SLB), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and IPSec.
Sun Networking software and hardware technologies available. We describe and explain how Sun differs from the competition in the networking arena, and then summarize the internal operations and describe technical details that lead into the tuning section. Currently there are only blind recommendations for tuning, with no explanations. This book fills that void by first describing the networking technology, which variables serve what purpose, what tuning will do, and why.
The Sun BluePrints Program
The mission of the Sun BluePrints program is to empower Sun s customers with the technical knowledge required to implement reliable, extensible, and secure information systems within the data center using Sun products. This program provides a framework to identify, develop, and distribute preferred practices information that applies across the Sun product lines. Experts in technical subjects in various areas contribute to the program and focus on the scope and advantages of the information.
The Sun BluePrints program includes books, guides, and online articles. Through these vehicles, Sun can provide guidance, installation and implementation experiences, real-life scenarios, and late-breaking technical information.
The monthly electronic magazine, Sun BluePrints OnLine, is located on the Web at:
http://www.sun.com/blueprints.
To be notified about updates to the Sun BluePrints program, please register on this site.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is intended for readers with varying degrees of experience with and knowledge of computer system and server technology, who are designing, deploying, and managing a data center within their organizations. Typically these individuals already have UNIX® knowledge and a clear understanding of their IP network architectural needs.
The book is targeted at network architects who must design and implement highly available, scalable data centers.
How This Book Is Organized
This book is organized into the following chapters:
Chapter 1 provides an overview of this book and its concepts.
Chapter 2 explores the main components of a typical enterprise Services on Demand network architecture and some of the more important underlying issues that impact network architecture design decisions.
Chapter 3 describes some of key Transport Control Protocol (TCP) tunable parameters related to performance tuning: how these tunables work, how they interact with each other, and how they impact network traffic when they are modified.
Chapter 4 describes the internal architecture of a basic network switch and provides a comprehensive discussion of server load balancing.
Chapter 5 discusses the networking technologies that are regularly found in a data center.
Chapter 6 provides an overview of the various approaches and describes where it makes sense to apply that solution.
Chapter 7 describes network implementation concepts and details.
Appendix A provides an example of the Lyapunov function.
Glossary provides definitions for the technical terms and acronyms used in this book.
Shell Prompts
| Shell | Prompt |
|---|---|
| C shell | machine-name% |
| C shell superuser | machine-name# |
| Bourne shell and Korn shell | $ |
| Bourne shell and Korn shell superuser | # |
Typographic Conventions
Accessing Sun Documentation
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