Book excerpt: The goal of this text is to describe the technical design aspects of the IT infrastructure; it does not give the details of installing and customizing SAP software, nor business process reengineering. Using primarily HP products for the solution examples, the chapters guide the reader through the foundation of the systems from an IT perspective, reviews its business application and architecture and introduces the server systems, then describes data storage, high availability and recovery solutions, client PCs with front-end user interfaces, output management and printing solutions, network infrastructure and requirements, cabling designs, LANs and WANs, and connecting mySAP.com to the Internet. Both authors are members of the HP-SAP International Competence Center. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR