iSCSI: The Universal Storage Connection is an informative overview and in-depth guide to the emerging iSCSI standard, the technology that enables data storage, access, and management over networks, intranets, and the Internet. The iSCSI protocol reduces the total cost of ownership of shared storage solutions and enables an organization to tie together disparate systems and data, including both server class systems and laptop and desktop systems. Numerous leading technology companies, including IBM®, Cisco Systems®, and Intel®, are currently supporting iSCSI initiatives.

Written for network and data storage professionals, this comprehensive book introduces iSCSI and explores its growing role within the data storage industry. It describes each element of the technology in detail—from session establishment through error handling—and examines the relationship between iSCSI and the SCSI protocol from which it evolved.

Specific topics discussed include:

• iSCSI's use in small office, midrange, and high-end settings
• TCP/IP fundamentals, and how they apply to iSCSI
• The importance of data integrity
• New hardware that addresses bandwidth and latency issues
• iSCSI naming conventions
• The establishment of a communication path between the host system and storage controller
• Commands and data sequencing
• Control of the flow of commands
• Task management
• Error handling
• Companion technologies, including discovery and security processes
• Backup and disaster preparation
• iSCSI performance issues

In addition, the book includes an explanation of the technologies that hardware vendors are implementing to permit direct memory placement of iSCSI messages without additional main processor involvement.

A helpful icon appears throughout the book, mapping out appropriate reading tracks based on your technical level.

Comprehensive, clearly written, and organized for easy access, this iSCSI handbook serves as both an excellent starting point for those involved in data storage solutions and a guide to understanding the technically detailed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) iSCSI Standards document.

About the Author

John L. Hufferd has been a key technical leader and manager within IBM for more than thirty-five years and currently directs projects dealing with networks, storage, and SANs. He is the technical coordinator for the iSCSI track of the IPS workgroup in the IETF standards association.

Work at your own pace through the easy numbered steps, practice files on CD, helpful hints, and troubleshooting tips to master the fundamentals of communicating your message effectively with the latest version of Office Publisher. Youll learn how to create professional-looking marketing and business materials, such as cards, flyers, and newsletters, by working with layout and design tools. Youll even learn how to export publications to PDF format for easy distribution and how to publish presentations to the web. With Step By Step, you can take just the lessons you need or work from cover to cover. Includes an easy-search companion CD with hands-on practice files, a complete eBook, a bonus quick reference to the new user interface, and more!

Key Book Benefits:

-Includes coverage of the fundamentals for designing effective business and marketing communications
-Features easy-to-follow lessons and hands-on skill-building exercises
-Includes an easy-search companion CD with practice files, a complete eBook, and other resources

About the Author

Joyce Cox has over 20 years' experience developing training materials about technical subjects for non-technical audiences. She is the author or coauthor of dozens of books about Microsoft Office applications and Microsoft Windows®, including Microsoft Office Word 2007 Step by Step, Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 Step by Step, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Step by Step. Joyce is the vice president of Online Training Solutions, Inc. She was president of and principle author for Online Press, where she developed the Quick Course series of computer training books for beginning and intermediate adult learners. She was also the first managing editor of Microsoft Press, an editor for Sybex, and an editor for the University of California.

Joan Preppernau is the author of over a dozen books about Windows and Microsoft Office applications, including Microsoft Office Word 2007 Step by Step, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Step by Step, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Step by Step from Microsoft Press. In addition, Joan helped develop the Quick Course books for Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows 2000, both published by Online Training Solutions, Inc., where she is the president. Having learned about computers literally at her father's knee, Joan's wide-ranging experiences in the computer industry contribute to her enthusiasm for producing interesting, useful, and understandable training materials.

Many organizations utilize traditional wire-based networking technologies to establish connections among computers. These technologies fall into the following three categories:

• Local area networks (LANs)
• Metropolitan area networks (MANs)
• Wide area networks (WANs)

LANs support the sharing of applications and printers, transfer of files, and sending e-mail within a room or building. Today, the industry standard for LANs is ethernet technology with 10baseT Category 5 twisted-pair wiring. MANs, which can cover the size of a college campus or large city, interconnect LANs by using protocols such as FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) and depend on leased circuits and optical fiber for transmission of the data. WANs, on the other hand, utilize telephone circuits, leased lines, and private circuits to support worldwide networking by using circuit and packet switching protocols.

Traditional networking technologies offer tremendous capabilities from an office, hotel room, or home. Activities such as communicating via e-mail with someone located in a faraway town or conveniently accessing product information from the World Wide Web are the result of widespread networking. But, limitations to networking through the use of wire-based systems exist because you cannot utilize these network services unless you are physically connected to a LAN or a telephone connection.

SGML and markup languages can make your life easier. In this chapter, you learn:

• Why markup languages are so popular
• What SGML has to do with ISO and CALS
• How SGML makes information transportable
• How SGML protects your formatting and structure
• How SGML is already gaining popularity on the Internet
• What the future holds for SGML

Why Markup Languages Are So Popular

Markup languages, such as SGML and HTML, have changed the nature of information. Thanks to them, you can transport information across the planet and through all kinds of computer platforms and hosts. Your documents always retain their original structure and format.

Presenting information no longer requires a specific machine. It does not matter whether you are writing on a UNIX box, a Macintosh, an IBM mainframe, or a PC. Markup languages_SGML in particular_make your treatise infinitely transportable without changing its original appearance. You can write a zoological treatise, a movie review complete with video and sound clips, or a multimedia presentation, and transport it without losing its structure, content, or format.

SGML also makes your documents modular, interchangeable, and flexible. Hypertext takes advantage of this sort of flexible presentation of information. For example, if you click highlighted text in a help file on your PC, your computer display automatically jumps to information related to that text. For that event to happen, someone had to mark up or encode the related information. SGML provides the greatest flexibility possible for this sort of information interchangeability.

Like many in the Linux community, you’ve probably heard of the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) program and the related RHCE exam, both of which were created by Red Hat, Inc. You may have heard that the RHCE exam is challenging, or you may have heard that it is not. You may have heard that the exam is focused on Red Hat Linux and that knowledge of Unix or a Linux distribution other than Red Hat Linux will not help you to pass the exam. Most of all, you may have wondered how RHCE certification might boost your career or, if you’re a hiring manager, whether RHCE certification could help you find qualified employees. I wrote this book to answer these questions and similar questions and to provide comprehensive material and exercises designed to prepare you to pass the RHCE exam.

The first edition of Programming Visual Basic .NET has been one of the most popular .NET books since its release in April 2002. Many readers have reviewed it on Amazon. com, citing it as one of the best .NET Framework books they’ve encountered. It is often the only Visual Basic book in Amazon’s list of top sellers in the Computer and Internet category. Being on that list for 18 months is in itself quite remarkable, considering that books of this type typically become obsolete in a couple of months.

Which leads us to this question: why write a completely revised second edition if readers seem so satisfied with the original book? After all, I could have just uploaded some new material on my www.vb2themax.com Web site, as I’ve done for minor fixes and typo reports.

As a matter of fact, when Microsoft released Visual Studio .NET 2003 and version 1.1 of the .NET Framework in spring 2003, I thought that a new edition of the book was unnecessary and that making some notes available online would suffice. Like many developers, I initially perceived the new versions as minor upgrades from previous ones, but then I realized that many applications written for version 1.0 behave differently (or don’t work at all) under the new version. The truth is many areas of the .NET Framework changed remarkably in version 1.1—most notably ASP.NET and Web services— and both Visual Studio .NET and Visual Basic .NET themselves have evolved from its initial 2002 release. Not being aware of the new features means missing an opportunity to make your code run faster and more reliably, plus it means wasting a lot of time and energy tweaking the code to have it run under .NET Framework version 1.1.

These kinds of problems became more critical with the release of Windows Server 2003, which improves on Windows 2000 Server in areas such as Component Services, Internet Information Services, and security. If you write enterprise-level applications, you should absolutely take advantage of the improved robustness, scalability, and security in Windows Server 2003. Alas, some of the information provided in the first edition of the book—especially in the chapters on ASP.NET—is outdated and of little use under the newest version of the operating system. (This holds true for most books based on version 1.0 of the .NET Framework.)

The last—and decisive—factor that convinced me to write a completely new book was the opportunity to cover a few important topics that I left out in the first edition—namely, PInvoke, COM Interop, COM+, remoting, code access security, and Windows Forms applications over HTTP—and to illustrate techniques that I learned after the first edition was published. A new edition also allows me to improve chapters with new descriptions and more focused code examples.