Written for those starting a career in IT or whose career is well advanced, this career guide shows how to blaze a path to success through the jungle of modern IT. With a career spanning five decades, the author shares lessons he learned the hard way so readers do not have to learn them the hard way. By emphasizing the importance of business processes and applications to IT, this book explains how to understand the value and positioning of hardware and software technology in order to make appropriate decisions. It addresses the importance of IT architecture and the roles service and systems management play. It also explains service level agreements (SLAs) and provides sample SLAs. Readers learn how to conduct IT assessments using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. It also shows how to use root-cause analysis (RCA) to detect the sources of failure and poor performance. An overview of risk management and the steps involved in developing a business continuity plan are also included. The book looks at all facets of an IT professional's career. It explains how to build an IT team and examines the roles and responsibilities within the team. It shows how to provide professional customer care to IT clients. Business executives recognize the importance of IT, and this book shows technology professionals how to thrive in the business world. It covers: Making effective presentations Report and proposal writing Negotiating and persuasion skills Running productive meetings Time and stress management The book also discusses such important career skills as listening, continual and incremental learning, and communicating at all levels. From its templates and checklists to its comprehensive and holistic view of a successful IT career, this book is an indispensable guide for every professional working in IT today and tomorrow.

This book on performance fundamentals covers UNIX, OpenVMS, Linux, Windows, and MVS. Most of the theory and systems design principles can be applied to other operating systems, as can some of the benchmarks. The book equips professionals with the ability to assess performance characteristics in unfamiliar environments. It is suitable for practitioners, especially those whose responsibilities include performance management, tuning, and capacity planning. IT managers with a technical outlook also benefit from the book as well as consultants and students in the world of systems for the first time in a professional capacity.

This book starts with the basic premise that a service is comprised of the 3Ps-products, processes, and people. Moreover, these entities and their sub-entities interlink to support the services that end users require to run and support a business. This widens the scope of any availability design far beyond hardware and software. It also increases the potential for service failure for reasons beyond just hardware and software; the concept of logical outages. High Availability IT Services details the considerations for designing and running highly available "services" and not just the systems infrastructure that supports those services. Providing an overview of virtualization and cloud computing, it supplies a detailed look at availability, redundancy, fault tolerance, and security. It also stresses the importance of human factors. The book starts off by providing an availability primer and detailing the reasons why you need to be concerned with high availability. Next, it outlines the theory of reliability and availability and the elements of actual practices in this high availability (HA) area, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Change Management. Examining what the major hardware and software vendors have to offer in the HA world, the book considers the ubiquitous world of clouds and virtualization as well as the availability considerations they present. The book examines high availability concepts and architectures such as reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS); clusters; grids; and redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID) storage. It also covers the role of security in providing high availability, cluster offerings, emergent Linux clusters, online transaction processing (OLTP), and relational databases.

This book starts with the basic premise that a service is comprised of the 3Ps-products, processes, and people. Moreover, these entities and their sub-entities interlink to support the services that end users require to run and support a business. This widens the scope of any availability design far beyond hardware and software. It also increases the potential for service failure for reasons beyond just hardware and software; the concept of logical outages. High Availability IT Services details the considerations for designing and running highly available "services" and not just the systems infrastructure that supports those services. Providing an overview of virtualization and cloud computing, it supplies a detailed look at availability, redundancy, fault tolerance, and security. It also stresses the importance of human factors. The book starts off by providing an availability primer and detailing the reasons why you need to be concerned with high availability. Next, it outlines the theory of reliability and availability and the elements of actual practices in this high availability (HA) area, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Change Management. Examining what the major hardware and software vendors have to offer in the HA world, the book considers the ubiquitous world of clouds and virtualization as well as the availability considerations they present. The book examines high availability concepts and architectures such as reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS); clusters; grids; and redundant arrays of independent disks (RAID) storage. It also covers the role of security in providing high availability, cluster offerings, emergent Linux clusters, online transaction processing (OLTP), and relational databases.

Written for those starting a career in IT or whose career is well advanced, this career guide shows how to blaze a path to success through the jungle of modern IT. With a career spanning five decades, the author shares lessons he learned the hard way so readers do not have to learn them the hard way. By emphasizing the importance of business processes and applications to IT, this book explains how to understand the value and positioning of hardware and software technology in order to make appropriate decisions. It addresses the importance of IT architecture and the roles service and systems management play. It also explains service level agreements (SLAs) and provides sample SLAs. Readers learn how to conduct IT assessments using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. It also shows how to use root-cause analysis (RCA) to detect the sources of failure and poor performance. An overview of risk management and the steps involved in developing a business continuity plan are also included. The book looks at all facets of an IT professional's career. It explains how to build an IT team and examines the roles and responsibilities within the team. It shows how to provide professional customer care to IT clients. Business executives recognize the importance of IT, and this book shows technology professionals how to thrive in the business world. It covers: Making effective presentations Report and proposal writing Negotiating and persuasion skills Running productive meetings Time and stress management The book also discusses such important career skills as listening, continual and incremental learning, and communicating at all levels. From its templates and checklists to its comprehensive and holistic view of a successful IT career, this book is an indispensable guide for every professional working in IT today and tomorrow.

This book on performance fundamentals covers UNIX, OpenVMS, Linux, Windows, and MVS. Most of the theory and systems design principles can be applied to other operating systems, as can some of the benchmarks. The book equips professionals with the ability to assess performance characteristics in unfamiliar environments. It is suitable for practitioners, especially those whose responsibilities include performance management, tuning, and capacity planning. IT managers with a technical outlook also benefit from the book as well as consultants and students in the world of systems for the first time in a professional capacity.