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.