Replication vs. Failure Prevention - How to Boost Service Availability?

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to provide a first analysis of the effectiveness of simple server replication vs. failure prevention in non-high-availability applications. We analyze service availability for a system with N servers where each server is modeled as a finite queue subject to failures. A Petri net analysis suggests that service availability is most effectively improved by server duplication, but for further improvement the combination with failure prevention seems most effective.