Information Storage and Management: Storing, Managing, and Protecting Digital Information at Dominant Systems Book Store

The spiraling growth of digital information makes the ISM book a "must have" addition to your IT reference library. This exponential growth has driven information management technology to new levels of sophistication and complexity, exposing a skills gap that challenge IT managers and professionals alike. The ISM book, written by storage professionals from EMC Corporation, takes an ‘open’ approach to teaching information storage and management, focusing on concepts and principles – rather that product specifics – that can be applied in all IT environments

The book enables existing and aspiring IT professionals, students, faculty, and those simply wishing to gain deeper insight to this emerging pillar of IT infrastructure to achieve a comprehensive understanding of all segments of information storage technology.

Sixteen chapters are organized into four sections. Advanced topics build upon the topics learned in previous chapters.

Section 1, "Information Storage and Management for Today’s World": Four chapters cover information growth and challenges, define a storage system and its environment, review the evolution of storage technology, and introduce intelligent storage systems.

Section 2, "Storage Options and Protocols": Six chapters cover the SCSI and Fibre channel architecture, direct-attached storage (DAS), storage area networks (SANs), network-attached storage (NAS), Internet Protocol SAN (IP-SAN), content-addressed storage (CAS), and storage virtualization.

Section 3, "Business Continuity and Replication": Four chapters introduce business continuity, backup and recovery, local data replication, and remote data replication.

Section 4, "Security and Administration": Two chapters cover storage security and storage infrastructure monitoring and management.

The book’s supplementary web site provides up-to-date information on additional learning aids and storage certification opportunities.

Customer Reviews & Comments
Over the past decade the world has witnessed an exponential growth of information and the rapid development of the storage technology industry. While both are certainly two sides of the same coin, it is debatable whether the former inspired the latter, or vice versa. Either way, storage technology has become a field of knowledge and information, in itself, and as such necessitates a didactic approach. The non-profit trade association - SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) - aims to lead the storage industry in developing and promoting educational services, and has accordingly developed a vendor-neutral certification program and courses. SNIA did not however publish any definitive textbook that would lay the foundation for an accessible storage networking's body of knowledge. This gap has been filled in the past years by several authors and vendors. EMC's "Information Storage and Management" (ISM) is the latest textbook of this kind. Starting with the bottom line, I would say that ISM is a well-written and coherent book. It succeeds in introducing the main theoretical issues of storage networking without ever losing its audience. As with all storage networking books ISM is also divided into several main sections - storage system, storage networking technologies and virtualization, business continuity, storage security and management. However, the book's new approach here is that each chapter ends with helpful real-life examples from the vast variety of EMC's product line. Considering this, the theoretical part of the book is short. This is, in my opinion, the main virtue of the book - being succinct and deep at the same time, the editors - G Somasundaram and Alok Shrivastava, have skillfully conveyed their massage. Novice readers, as well as experienced IT and storage practitioners, will benefit from reading the book. Nonetheless, the book suffers from a few flows, mainly in neglecting to get into details regarding some emerging technologies and concepts like green storage, cloud storage, de-duplication SSD and FCoE. I believe that adding these issues would not have compromised the book's coherency and brevity. Another aspect of ISM is that one can use it as study guide for EMC's E20-001 exam, leading to EMC Proven Professional Associate certification. Plainly, EMC has intended the book not only to promote the theoretical knowledge of storage networking in the IT and academic communities, but also to initiate them into "the EMC path". This dual goal (as seen also in the usage of EMC products as examples in each theoretical chapter) is unavoidable and in my opinion should not be frowned upon. On the contrary, following "Information Storage and Management" I believe that EMC education services should publish additional books that will further enhance general knowledge of storage networking. Two likely candidates that will most certainly benefit both the general public and EMC are "Storage Networking Design and Management" and "Information Availability Design and Management".

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