Books by W.Curtis Preston

W. Curtis Preston has specialized in designing backup and recovery systems for over six years, and has designed such systems for many environments, both large and small. The first environment that Curtis was responsible for went from 7 small servers to 250 large servers in just over two years, running Oracle, Informix, and Sybase databases and five versions of Unix. He started managing this environment with homegrown utilities and eventually installed the first of many commercial backup utilities. His passion for backup and recovery began with managing the data growth of this 24x7, mission-critical environment. Having designed backup systems for environments with small budgets, Curtis has developed a number of freely available tools, including ones that perform live backups of Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. He has ported these tools to a number of environments, including Linux, and they are running at companies around the world. Curtis is now a principal consultant for Collective Technologies, where they have developed a proven system for choosing a commercial backup utility when the environment and budget allow one to be purchased. This system has been used to select commercial backup systems for some of the world's largest environments, including a six terabyte Oracle database and one site with a total storage capacity of five petabytes. Once software and hardware selection is completed, they design and implement a complete system based on the customer's requirements. Curtis states that he could have never written the book without the use of the Collective Intellect(TM), or the "C.I." as he calls it. Collective Technologies' 400 consultants have administered every major operating system, and they support each other by freely sharing their "collective" experiences, referred to as the Collective Intellect(tm). While writing the book, Curtis asked the C.I. hundreds of questions that would have taken him years to research on his own. In a few cases, entire chapters were written by people who demonstrated expertise in a certain area. Curtis believes that the C.I. has made this a far better book than he ever envisioned.