Dependability of a Network Monitoring Hardware

System dependability plays an important role in the realization of computer communication infrastructures and the everyday operations and maintenance of computer networks. Increased redundancy is used as a common practice to improve dependability, however in some cases duplication of a networking equipment is not desirable due to high cost or increased system complexity as a result of handling potentially duplicated data. In such cases a single point of failure exists. In this paper we first present a highly dependable networking hardware architecture and demonstrate its application in a monitoring example then we provide a detailed dependability analysis for the hardware used in monitoring application.