Understanding large system failures-a fault injection experiment
Ram Chillarege, Nicholas S. Bowen · 2003
Fault injection is used to characterize large system failures. Thus, it overcomes limitations imposed by the lack of complete information in field failure data. The experiment is conducted on a commercial transaction processing system. The authors: (1) introduce the idea of failure acceleration to conduct such experiments; (2) estimate total loss of the primary service to occur in only 16% of the faults; (3) reveal errors termed potential hazards that do not affect short-term availability but cause a catastrophic failure following a change in operating state; and (4) identify at least 41% of errors as potential candidates for repair before total failure. The results enhance the understanding of large system failures and provide a foundation for design enhancements and modeling of availability.>