Networked Windows NT system field failure data analysis

Author

Xu, Jun ; Kalbarczyk, Zbigniew ; Iyer, Ravishankar K.

Author_Institution

Center for Reliable & High Performance Comput., Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL, USA

fYear

1999

fDate

1999

Firstpage

178

Lastpage

185

Abstract

This paper presents a measurement-based dependability study of a Networked Windows NT system based on field data collected from NT System Logs from 503 servers running in a production environment over a four-month period. The event logs at hand contains only system reboot information. We study individual server failures and domain behavior in order to characterize failure behavior and explore error propagation between servers. The key observations from this study are: (1) system software and hardware failures are the two major contributors to the total system downtime (22% and 10%), (2) recovery from application software failures are usually quick, (3) in many cases, more than one reboots are required to recover from a failure, (4) the average availability of an individual server is over 99%, (5) there is a strong indication of error dependency or error propagation across the network, (6) most (58%) reboots are unclassified indicating the need for better logging techniques, (7) maintenance and configuration contribute to 24% of system downtime

Keywords

computer network management; fault tolerant computing; network operating systems; network servers; software management; software reliability; system recovery; NT System Logs; application software failures; error propagation; event logs; field failure data analysis; individual server failures; measurement-based dependability study; networked Windows NT system; system reboot information; system software; total system downtime; Buildings; Computer networks; Data analysis; File systems; Hardware; High performance computing; Network servers; Postal services; Production systems; Read only memory;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Dependable Computing, 1999. Proceedings. 1999 Pacific Rim International Symposium on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-0371-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/PRDC.1999.816227

Filename

816227