Quantifying and Improving the Availability of High-Performance Cluster-Based Internet Services

Cluster-based servers can substantially increase performance when nodes cooperate to globally manage resources. However, in this paper we show that cooperation results in a substantial availability loss, in the absence of high-availability mechanisms. Specifically, we show that a sophisticated cluster-based Web server, which gains a factor of 3 in performance through cooperation, increases service unavailability by a factor of 10 over a non-cooperative version. We then show how to augment this Web server with software components embodying a small set of high-availability techniques to regain the lost availability. Among other interesting observations, we show that the application of multiple highavailability techniques, each implemented independently in its own subsystem, can lead to inconsistent recovery actions. We also show that a novel technique called Fault Model Enforcement can be used to resolve such inconsistencies. Augmenting the server with these techniques led to a final ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SC
• Authors: Kiran Nagaraja, Neeraj Krishnan, Ricardo Bianchini, Richard P. Martin, Thu D. Nguyen
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Cluster-based Web Server, SC 2003, Substantial Availability Loss, Web Server