Perception of Downtime in High Availability Solutions
Wilson Smith and Kishor Trivedi
The 17th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering: Fast Abstracts (ISSRE 2006)
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, November 6-10 2006
Abstract
This fast abstract reports on work that examines relative and perceived server outages caused by hardware and by software. The hardware model is based on a hierarchical model that uses the IBM BladeCenter as the hardware platform for the comparison. Software faults similiar to those necessitating software rejuvenation can have numerous causes in commercial, off-the-shelf equipment using a heterogeneous software environment. This study uses relatively infrequent software faults that result in downtime not drastically different from hardware induced downtime and describes how customers might still perceive that software unreliability is the overwhelming cause of server unavailability.