Availability analysis and improvement of Active/Standby cluster systems using software rejuvenation
Cluster systems, using commercially available personal computers connected in a loosely coupled fashion can provide high levels of availability. To improve the availability of personal computer-based Active/Standby cluster systems, we have conducted a study of software rejuvenation that follows a proactive fault-tolerant approach to handle software-origin system failure. In this paper, we map software rejuvenation and switchover states with a semi-Markov process and get mathematical steady-state solutions of the chain. We calculate the availability and the downtime of Active/Standby cluster systems using the solutions and find that software rejuvenation can be used to improve the availability of Active/Standby cluster systems.