Software Rejuvenation: Do IT & Telco Industries Use It?

Software rejuvenation has been addressed in hundreds of papers since it was proposed in 1995 by Huang et al. The growing number of research papers shows the great importance of this topic. However, no paper has studied yet software rejuvenation in the real world. This paper investigates to what extent software rejuvenation techniques are integrated in the IT and Telco solutions. For this purpose, it has been conducted an intensive search of different sources such as company´s product websites, technical papers, white papers, US patents, and consultant surveys. The results show that IT and Telco companies develop software rejuvenation solutions to deal with software aging. The number of US patents addressing this issue confirms the interest of industry to develop mechanisms to deal with software aging-related failures. It has been observed that real software rejuvenation solutions mainly use time-based or threshold-based policies, while the US patents are focused on predictive approaches.