A census of Tandem system availability between 1985 and 1990

Author

Gray, Jim

Author_Institution

Tandem Comp. Inc., Cupertino, CA, USA

Volume

39

Issue

4

fYear

1990

fDate

10/1/1990 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

409

Lastpage

418

Abstract

A census of customer outages reported to Tandem showing a clear improvement in the reliability of hardware and maintenance has been taken. It indicates that software is now the major source of reported outages (62%), followed by system operations (15%). This is a dramatic shift from the statistics for 1985. Even after discounting systematic underreporting of operations and environmental outages, the conclusion is clear: hardware faults and hardware maintenance are no longer a major source of outages. As the other components of the system become increasingly reliable, software necessarily becomes the dominant cause of outages. Achieving higher availability requires improvement in software quality and software fault tolerance, simpler operations, and tolerance of operational faults

Keywords

computer installation; computer maintenance; fault tolerant computing; software reliability; Tandem system availability; customer outages; hardware; hardware faults; hardware maintenance; maintenance; reliability; software fault tolerance; software quality; system operations; Application software; Availability; Databases; Design engineering; Fault tolerant systems; Hardware; History; Reliability engineering; Software maintenance; Statistics;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Reliability, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9529

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/24.58719

Filename

58719