Appendix B. Resources

Appendix B. Resources

Books Worth Reading

Organizations and Conferences

Web Sites Worth Visiting

Government Documents and Resources

Books Worth Reading

No single book can tell the whole story of anything. This is especially true of a multidisciplinary subject such as data protection. Following is a list of some of the books that I refer to on a regular basis. Some provide more detail on specific subjects; others, simply a different point of view.

Building Storage Networks , by Marc Farley (Osborne/McGraw-Hill). This book is still one of the most comprehensive tomes on storage technology. It is a soup-to-nuts reference book on all things storage, especially storage networks.

Using SANs and NAS , by Curtis Preston (O'Reilly). Short and concise , this book's strength is its excellent explanation of backup and restore.

The Essential Guide to Telecommunications , by Annabel Z. Dodd (Prentice Hall). This is a comprehensive introduction to telecommunications. Although much of the book deals with phone systems, the portions on data communications are excellent, especially for planning remote copy and replication systems.

XML in a Nutshell , by Elliott Rusty Harold and W. Scott Means (O'Reilly). For those who want to use XML to express DLM and ILM policies, this book is a handy reference. It covers all the major topics without verbosity .

Network Security: A Beginner's Guide , by Eric Maiwald (Osborne/McGraw-Hill). A good starter book for those who are interested in security topics. It's an easy read because the author makes complex, security subjects understandable to us mere mortals .

Ancot Corporation publishes two small books that are great primers on storage technology. Basics of SCSI and What Is Fibre Channel? are available for free on the web site www.ancot.com. The books are very technical in nature and contain ads for Ancot products. They are an excellent reference for those who want to delve deeper into storage protocols without reading reams of standards documents.

Tom Clark has also written several interesting books. Two titles of special interest are Designing Storage Networks and IP SANs: An Introduction to iSCSI, iFCP, and FCIP Protocols for Storage Area Networks , both published by Addison-Wesley Professional. That latter provides in-depth treatment of SANs running over IP networks. It is one of the few books to focus entirely on IP SANs.