Reviews for Configuration and Capacity Planning for Solaris Servers

1. Outdated book, doesnt cover new Sun Enterprise Servers!!!

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, July 12rd, 1999

   This book is ok for the older Sun Sparc hardware but its outdated by at least 4 years! There is no coverage of Sun Enterprise servers like the E10000, E3500 or E4000!!!! That makes the book a total waste of money!!! better off, go to docs.sun.com at least its free

2. Definitive but not well-structured!

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 1999

   There is no other book like this, and it does an amazing--MONUMENTAL!!!--job of collecting a lot of the most relevant information together.

   My biggest complaint is that this book is NOT a good reference. There is no quick way to find out what is the best way to configure, say, a RAID-5 partition for sequential access for a database with read size of 2KB. You have to literally read through about 100 pages of RAID, disk, SCSI, and filesystem parameter discussions to "compile" the answer. The information that is in the book can be confusing, even conflicting. Methodolgy is often missing or vague.

   Possibly, the book suffers from being the first edition. I sincerely hope that a new one will be coming out soon, and will include structural changes as well as information about SUNs latest hardware (the book stops with E6000).

   Once again, I do recommend this book to everyone. If you want to read the best book there is on capacity planning in the SUN world, this is the one for you. Just don't expect to get your answers by looking in the index. :)

3. Great "Inside" Information

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, August 12rd, 1998

   Finally, a single reference that includes performance and throughput numbers for most Sun equipment from 1990 through 1997. Mr. Wong also includes very good descriptions of the various architectures, their similarities, differences, strengths, and weaknesses.

4. The choice for system configurators!

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 1998

   Mr. Wong's book provides not only an in-depth coverage of capacity planning, but for us who have to configure enterprise systems, and excellent and authoritative guide with practical examples to system configurations. It is a wee bit behind with respect to current technology, which can be expected in this industry, but still provides sound fundamental concepts for system planning and configuration. I highly recommend it to DBA's and SysAdmins, moreover to all those responsible for the art of enterprise system configurations.

5. Great book to figure out how to tweak everything Solaris

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 1997

   It goes into great detail about the smallest parameters for SCSI (and other types of disks), RAID architectures, memory and bus timing and much more. Learn why RAID may not be the best means of getting faster disk access. Figure out when you *shouldn't* upgrade that old server in favor of that shiny new one. Most explanations and suggestions are backed up with plenty of real-world data and graphs. It's goal is to help administrators get the most from what they've got and how to scale and appropriately purchase what they want. A very thorough and technical book, and it's rather current (Ultra Enterprise servers are covered throughout). In addition, it details (much) older systems and their architectures. Highly recommended reading for database, system, and web server admins.