I wanted to thank both Annlee and Priscilla for their reviews. While
I appreciate the positivism in both books, these reviewers are the
sort of people that keep me honest. They also tolerate my sense of
humor -- I write books the same way I make odd posts, and I think
Monty Python is just as important in both cases. I haven't forgotten,
however, Schwarzenegger's Laws of Networking, or the crazy commander
who wanted his crew to sweep up the one bits.
It's worth clarifying a bit why I wrote this book, and its
relationship to the new book project I have underway. People ask me
sometimes how books get created, and maybe this will give some
insight. With 20/20 hindsight, my editor and I realized that the
title of this book may be slightly misleading. Oh, it's definitely
about WANs, but it's about a specific aspect of WANs, which
complements the work in the new book.
The current "WAN Survival Guide" is a guide principally for the
enterprise designer that wants to choose among WAN technology options
and complementary technologies. Its secondary audience will be found
in carriers and ISPs. By complementary technologies, I refer to such
things as the roles of firewalls, load balancers, fault-tolerant
servers, etc., in obtaining the desired service from the overall
WAN-based applications.
I've had some very real customers ask me to do very silly things
because they lost sight of the Big WAN Picture: there is a site, at a
location I dare not name, which has diverse SONET physical
connectivity in the local loop, BGP connectivity with two independent
ISPs, and a single application server. You will be comforted to know
that the server has a backup tape drive--but there was no machine
onto which the tape could be restored.
So perhaps the WAN Survival Book could have been titled something
like "defining your SLA requirements and selecting ways, network- and
non-network, to get them carried out."
My new book with Wiley, which should be finished late this year, is
tentatively titled "Building Service Provider Networks." In many
respects, it is the mirror image of the WAN Survival Book, because it
focuses first on the provider and secondly on the subscriber. Its
basic premise is how the provider offers what services (and SLAs) to
offer, and how to build the internal network that can deliver them.
Lots of people here have given me ideas for case studies that will be
in this new book. It will have few or no specific router
configuration examples (although that might be available as an
appendix, CD-ROM, etc.). Its focus is deciding what you want your
BGP and IGP routers to do, rather than how to configure them.
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