Readers who are looking for a broad introduction to reliability issues related to information technology (IT) systems will find this book useful. Besides dealing with various technical aspects (such as hardware, software, and network-related aspects), it also addresses the business perspective, which is extremely important in the reliability context but usually receives little emphasis. The book represents it mainly in terms of cost and service-focused issues.

The book consists of 15 concise chapters, divided into three groups that present basics, main concepts, and design problems. The first part, consisting of three chapters, gives the reader a glimpse into some common reliability issues, such as “five nines” availability, the failure recovery cycle, and a bathtub curve explanation. The first part also looks at other areas of interest that the book covers: system management from the reliability viewpoint, a relationship between quality and reliability, and relevant cost concerns, to name a few. The last chapter of this part characterizes various types of failures.

The second set of chapters covers four major topics of reliability provisioning: containment and redundancy, design aimed at reliability improvement, the detection of failures at different levels, and modeling and quantitatively analyzing reliability.

The last and largest part presents ideas for how to provide service reliability in an existing enterprise. The six chapters elaborate on the definition of requirements, analysis of reliability provisioning mechanisms, downtime prediction, testing, and system monitoring. A summarizing case study on a networking system is also included. The book ends with a conclusion chapter and an appendix with a checklist of the most important steps in a reliable design cycle.

This work focuses on introducing ideas. Though the book is self-contained to some extent, a reader must look for a deeper explanation elsewhere. The fact that the text provides a broad view is obviously an advantage, but a person who is trained in reliability may perceive that as a shortcoming, since it does not provide much detailed information. Thus, I highly recommend this book to undergraduate students and junior researchers entering the reliability studies field. Though experts may not find the book to be very interesting, they will likely find it useful as a basis for lecturing, and as a good source of insightful, fundamental ideas.