Foreword to Matthew Liotine's Mission-Critical Network Planning

September 11, 2001, is a defining date in U.S. and world history. September 11, or 911, may also prove to be a defining event for business networking, as 911 brought attention to the challenging practices and processes of maintaining states of preparedness in critical infrastructures. Among these were the communications infrastructure built around and upon Internet technology. While the news coverage in the days and weeks following 911 justly focused on the human tragedy, many individuals and organizations affected by the terrorist acts struggled to resume business as usual. Those for whom the Internet was critical to their business processes were either devastated by the extent to which they were isolated from customers, partners, and even their colleagues, or they were surprised (if not astonished) that their businesses processes were rapidly restored, and in some cases, remained nearly intact.

The first group undoubtedly struggled through a slow, painful, disruptive, and expensive process we call business resumption and disaster recovery. The latter group included a handful of "lucky ducks" but many more organizations for which business and network continuity were carefully planned and implemented. When needed, these continuity measures executed as intended. For these organizations, 911 was not a defining event in a business sense, but a catastrophic event for which they had prepared their business and network operations.

A second and equally compelling reason that 911 was not a defining event to the latter group is that maintaining business and network continuity is as much about maintaining good performance when confronted with incidental events and temporary outages as it is when confronted with catastrophic ones.

In this unique work, Matthew Liotine presents strategies, best practices, processes, and techniques to prepare networks that are survivable and have stable behavior. He shows us how to design survivable networks that perform well and can quickly recover from a variety of problems to a well-performing state using commercial, off-the-shelf equipment and public services. The proactive measures and anticipatory planning Matthew presents here are immensely more useful lessons to learn and apply than resumption and recovery measures.

This book discusses problems and offers recommendations and solutions in each of the IT disciplines most often seen in large enterprises today. All of the major functional areas-networking (wide area and local area networks); hardware and operating system platforms, applications, and services; facilities, recovery and mirroring sites, and storage; and management and testing-are examined. Matthew provides the most comprehensive analysis I have seen thus far in our industry. Matthew establishes a wonderful balance between technology and business, complementing useful technical insight for the IT manager and staff with equally useful insight into planning, practice, process, manpower, and capital expenses for the business development folks. If your network is truly something you view as mission critical, you cannot afford to overlook this work.

David Piscitello
Core Competence, Inc.