Recovery of commodity multi-site email clusters

Author

Risson, John ; Moors, Tim

Author_Institution

New South Wales Univ., Sydney, NSW, Australia

Volume

2

fYear

2005

fDate

16-18 Nov. 2005

Abstract

Internet service providers need ways to improve the dependability of their email services. Existing single-site and multi-site, synchronously replicated message stores have low availability. Recovery of multi-site, asynchronously replicated stores is slow and inconsistent. This paper´s two-dimensional Markov analysis shows that the availability of an email service is fundamentally limited by site mean-time-to-failure (MTTF), not by the message store MTTF. Replication of the message store at two and three sites can improve the service MTTF by two and four orders of magnitude respectively. One order of magnitude improvement in the storage mean-time-to-repair for two- and three-site replication improves the service MTTF by one and two orders of magnitude respectively. Improvements in the MTTF of current storage technology will not significantly improve email service availability.

Keywords

Internet; Markov processes; computer network reliability; electronic mail; Internet service providers; commodity multisite email clusters; mean-time-to-failure; mean-time-to-repair; multisite recovery; two-dimensional Markov analysis; Australia; Availability; Electronic mail; Message service; Network servers; Personal communication networks; Postal services; Redundancy; Web and internet services; Web server; Markov analysis; availability; distributed hash tables; email;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Networks, 2005. Jointly held with the 2005 IEEE 7th Malaysia International Conference on Communication., 2005 13th IEEE International Conference on

ISSN

1531-2216

Print_ISBN

1-4244-0000-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICON.2005.1635632

Filename

1635632