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Benchmarks have historically guided research and development in computer
systems performance. As availability becomes an increasingly important
metric for evaluating computer systems, there is a natural demand for
availability benchmarks. However, industry-wide availability benchmarks do
not exist today. This paper proposes a framework for benchmarking the
availability of computer systems. Our goal in this effort is to define a
framework which can be used to implement availability benchmarks that are
applicable across a wide range of systems. The proposed framework is a
hierarchical approach which goes beyond direct benchmarking of availability
in terms of number of outage minutes per year. This paper identifies the
three key attributes impacting system availability (fault and maintenance
rate, robustness, and recovery), and methods to benchmark these key
attributes of availability.
Keywords: Availability, Benchmark, Evaluation, Framework, Testing
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