The Shortcut Guide to Network Management for the Mid-Market, written for SMB and mid-market businesses, outlines real-world technologies, processes, and guiding steps necessary to transform your network operations from reactive to proactive.
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The Shortcut Guide To
Network
Management
for the Mid-Market
sponsored by
Greg ShieldsIntroduction
Introduction to Realtimepublishers
by Don Jones, Series Editor For several years, now, Realtime has produced dozens and dozens of high-quality books that just happen to be delivered in electronic format-at no cost to you, the reader. We've made this unique publishing model work through the generous support and cooperation of our sponsors, who agree to bear each book's production expenses for the benefit of our readers. Although we've always offered our publications to you for free, don't think for a moment that quality is anything less than our top priority. My job is to make sure that our books are as good as-and in most cases better than-any printed book that would cost you $40 or more. Our electronic publishing model offers several advantages over printed books: You receive chapters literally as fast as our authors produce them (hence the "realtime" aspect of our model), and we can update chapters to reflect the latest changes in technology. I want to point out that our books are by no means paid advertisements or white papers. We're an independent publishing company, and an important aspect of my job is to make sure that our authors are free to voice their expertise and opinions without reservation or restriction. We maintain complete editorial control of our publications, and I'm proud that we've produced so many quality books over the past years. I want to extend an invitation to visit us at http://nexus.realtimepublishers.com, especially if you've received this publication from a friend or colleague. We have a wide variety of additional books on a range of topics, and you're sure to find something that's of interest to you-and it won't cost you a thing. We hope you'll continue to come to Realtime for your educational needs far into the future. Until then, enjoy. Don Jones
iForeword
Foreword
I've written a number of books-including several for Realtimepublishers-focused on network administration. Most of my books, however, have been focused on enterprise administration. In today's industry, enterprise has become a poorly defined, overused word. I usually use this term to mean very large, distributed organizations-ones with tens of thousands of users and annual IT budgets in the millions. Many of the management techniques and tactics I've discussed have been oriented for these larger companies, and might not be appropriate for smaller companies who are trying to work on an IT budget of "merely" a few hundred thousand dollars, or even just a "few" million. It's an important distinction to make: Most businesses in the world today aren't super-sized enterprises, and most businesses don't spend more on IT each year than some small countries have in their entire annual budgets. That's why I think it's high time we release a book like the one you're now reading. In it, my good friend and colleague Greg Shields tackles network administration from the small- to medium-sized business' point of view. His focus is on the underlying technologies of network administration, and on using tools and technologies that are more practical for a midsized company's operations staff and budget. He'll take a detailed look at options such as open source tools in addition to helping you come up with a good set of specifications for various types of tools-whether you decide to build them yourself, go open source, or evaluate commercial products. Greg's also going for a lot broader coverage in this short book than I have in other books, where I focused mainly on network device management. He's also looking at network performance monitoring, network analysis, security issues, and much more. That's appropriate, too; the largest companies tend to segregate these tasks across dedicated teams, but midsized companies tend to rely on a handful of "do everything" professionals who may even be responsible for server maintenance and the occasional desktop support call. This book's coverage will reflect those broad and varied responsibilities, although it'll stay firmly focused on the network infrastructure-sorry, no server and desktop support help, here! The network's been taken for granted for far too long, and it's great to see experienced authors like Greg taking a heightened interest. With Voice over IP (VoIP), intense media streaming, and othe... [download for more]
