Abstract
As modern society becomes more and more dependent on computers and computer networks, vulnerability and downtime of these systems will significantly impact daily life from both social and economic point of view. Words like reliability and downtime are frequently heard on radio and television and read in newspapers and magazines. Thus reliability and availability have become popular terms. However, even professionals are in the danger of misunderstanding these basic concepts. Such misunderstandings can hinder advances in designing and deploying high-availability and high-reliability systems.
This paper delves into ten fallacious yet popular notions in availability and reliability. While the discussions on the first five fallacies clarify some misconceptions among reliability engineers working on modeling and analysis, the remaining five fallacies provide important insights to system engineers and companies focusing on system level integration.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Barlow, R.E., Proschan, F.: Statistical Theory of Reliability and Life Testing - Probability Models. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1975)
Leemis, L.M.: Reliability: Probability Models and Statistical Methods. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1995)
Patterson, D.A., Gibson, G.A., Katz, R.H.: A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID). In: Proc. SIGMOD Conference, pp. 109–116 (1988)
Trivedi, K.S.: Probability & Statistics with Reliability, Queueing, and Computer Science Applications, 2nd edn. John Wiley and Sons, New York (2001)
Schroeder, B., Gibson, G.A.: Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? In: Proc. 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (2007)
Hald, A.: Statistical Theory with Engineering Applications. John Wiley and Sons, New York (1952)
Fricks, R.M., Ketcham, M.: Steady-state availability estimation using field failure data. In: Proc. Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium 2004, pp. 81–85 (2004)
Grottke, M., Trivedi, K.S.: On a method for mending time to failure distributions. In: Proc. International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks 2005, pp. 560–569 (2005)
Trivedi, K.S., Muppala, J.K., Woolet, S.P., Haverkort, B.R.: Composite performance and dependability analysis. Performance Evaluation 14(3 & 4), 197–216 (1992)
Wang, D., Fricks, R., Trivedi, K.S.: Dealing with non-exponential distributions in dependability models. In: Kotsis, G. (ed.) Performance Evaluation - Stories and Perspectives, pp. 273–302. Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft, Wien (2003)
Trivedi, K.S., Sathaye, A., Ibe, O., Howe, R.: Should I add a processor? In: Proc. Twenty-third Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 214–221 (1990)
Choi, H., Kulkarni, V.G., Trivedi, K.S.: Markov regenerative stochastic Petri nets. Performance Evaluation 20, 335–357 (1994)
Xie, W., Sun, H., Cao, Y., Trivedi, K.S.: Modeling of user perceived webserver availability. In: Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications, vol. 3, pp. 1796–1800 (2003)
Lanus, M., Lin, Y., Trivedi, K.S.: Hierarchical composition and aggregation of state-based availability and performability models. IEEE Trans. Reliability 52(1), 44–52 (2003)
Birnbaum, Z.W.: On the importance of different components in a multicomponent system. In: Krishnaiah, P.R. (ed.) Multivariate Analysis - II, pp. 581–592. Academic Press, New York (1969)
Henley, E.J., Kumamoto, H.: Reliability Engineering and Risk Assessment. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1981)
Wang, D., Fricks, R.M., Trivedi, K.S.: Importance analysis with Markov chains. In: Proc. Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, pp. 89–95 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Grottke, M., Sun, H., Fricks, R.M., Trivedi, K.S. (2008). Ten Fallacies of Availability and Reliability Analysis. In: Nanya, T., Maruyama, F., Pataricza, A., Malek, M. (eds) Service Availability. ISAS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5017. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68129-8_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68129-8_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68128-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-68129-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)