Chapter 3 - Server Configurations

About This Chapter

When you design a highly available network, you should make server configurations part of the planning process in order to ensure that services continue to function in the event of a hardware or software failure or data corruption. You can make a server more available by using redundant and cold- or hot-swappable components and by providing an environment that safely houses the servers, their network connections, and other network components. You should also implement a data storage strategy that ensures against data loss and reduces the mean time between failures (MTBF) in the event of lost data. In this chapter you’ll learn how to design a server configuration and data storage system that are fault-tolerant.

Before You Begin

To complete the lessons in this chapter, you must have

• A basic understanding of the hardware components in a computer
• An understanding of how to maintain hard disks and implement disk storage strategies such as redundant array of independent disks (RAID)