High Availability Computing
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High Availability Computing
High availability (HA) is a characteristic of a system that aims to ensure an agreed level of operational performance, usually uptime, for a higher than normal period. There is now more dependence on these systems as a result of modernization. For example, to carry out their regular daily tasks, hospitals and data centers need their systems to be highly available. Availability refers to the ability of the user to access a service or system, whether to submit new work, update or modify existing work, or retrieve the results of previous work. If a user cannot access the system, it is considered ''unavailable from the user's perspective''. The term ''downtime'' is generally used to refer to describe periods when a system is unavailable. Resilience High availability is a property of computer network, network resilience, the ability to "provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of Fault (technology), faults and challenges to normal operation." Threats and chall ...
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Uptime
Uptime is a Measurement, measure of system reliability, expressed as the period of system time, time a machine, typically a computer, has been continuously working and available. Uptime is the opposite of downtime. It is often used as a measure of computer operating system reliability or stability, in that this time represents the time a computer can be left unattended without crash (computing), crashing or needing to be booting, rebooted for administrative or maintenance purposes. Conversely, long uptime may indicate negligence, because some critical updates can require reboots on some platforms. Records In 2005, Novell reported a server with a 6-year uptime. This level of uptime is common when servers are maintained under an industrial context and host critical applications such as banking systems. Netcraft maintains the uptime records for many thousands of web hosting computers. A server running Novell NetWare has been reported to have been shut down after 16 years of uptime ...
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Maintenance
The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installations. Terms such as "predictive" or "planned" maintenance describe various cost-effective practices aimed at keeping equipment operational; these activities occur either before or after a potential failure. Definitions Maintenance functions can be defined as maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO), and MRO is also used for maintenance, repair and operations. Over time, the terminology of maintenance and MRO has begun to become standardized. The United States Department of Defense uses the following definitions: Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188 and from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms * Any activity—such as tests, measurements, replacements, adjustments, and repairs—intended to retain ...
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Network Outage
In computing and telecommunications, downtime (also (system) outage or (system) drought colloquially) is a period when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an unplanned event, or because of routine maintenance (a planned event). The terms are commonly applied to networks and servers. The common reasons for unplanned outages are system failures (such as a crash) or communications failures (commonly known as network outage or network drought colloquially). For outages due to issues with general computer systems, the term computer outage (also IT outage or IT drought) can be used. The term is also commonly applied in industrial environments in relation to failures in industrial production equipment. Some facilities measure the downtime incurred during a work shift, or during a 12- or 24-hour period. Another common practice is to i ...
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Availability
In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings: * The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at an unknown, ''i.e.'' a random, time. * The probability that an item will operate satisfactorily at a given point in time when used under stated conditions in an ideal support environment. Normally high availability systems might be specified as 99.98%, 99.999% or 99.9996%. The converse, unavailability, is 1 minus the availability. Representation The simplest representation of availability (''A'') is a ratio of the expected value of the uptime of a system to the aggregate of the expected values of up and down time (that results in the "total amount of time" ''C'' of the observation window) : A = \frac = \frac Another equation for availability (''A'') is a ratio of the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) and Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), or ...
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Nanosecond
A nanosecond (ns) is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one billionth of a second, that is, of a second, or seconds. The term combines the SI prefix ''nano-'' indicating a 1 billionth submultiple of an SI unit (e.g. nanogram, nanometre, etc.) and ''second'', the primary unit of time in the SI. A nanosecond is to one second, as one second is to approximately 31.69 years. A nanosecond is equal to 1000  picoseconds or  microsecond. Time units ranging between 10 and 10 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of nanoseconds. Time units of this granularity are commonly found in telecommunications, pulsed lasers, and related aspects of electronics. Common measurements * 0.001 nanoseconds – one  picosecond * 0.96 nanoseconds – 100 Gigabit Ethernet Interpacket gap * 96 nanoseconds – Gigabit Ethernet Interpacket gap * 1.0 nanosecond – cycle time of an electromagnetic wave with a frequency of 1 GHz (). * 1.0 ...
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Microsecond
A microsecond is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one millionth (0.000001 or 10−6 or ) of a second. Its symbol is μs, sometimes simplified to us when Unicode is not available. A microsecond is to one second, as one second is to approximately 11.57 days. A microsecond is equal to 1000 nanoseconds or of a millisecond. Because the next SI prefix is 1000 times larger, measurements of 10−5 and 10−4 seconds are typically expressed as tens or hundreds of microseconds. Examples * 1 microsecond (1 μs) – cycle time for frequency (1 MHz), the inverse unit. This corresponds to radio wavelength 300 m (AM medium wave band), as can be calculated by multiplying 1 μs by the speed of light (approximately ). * 1 microsecond – the length of time of a high-speed, commercial strobe light flash (see air-gap flash). * 1 microsecond – protein folding takes place on the order of microseconds (thus this is the speed of carbon-based ...
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Millisecond
A millisecond (from '' milli-'' and second; symbol: ms) is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to one thousandth (0.001 or 10−3 or 1/1000) of a second or 1000 microseconds. A millisecond is to one second, as one second is to approximately 16.67 minutes. A unit of 10 milliseconds may be called a centisecond, and one of 100 milliseconds a decisecond, but these names are rarely used. To help compare orders of magnitude of different times, this page lists times between 10−3 seconds and 100 seconds (1 millisecond and one second). ''See also'' times of other orders of magnitude. Examples The Apollo Guidance Computer used metric units internally, with centiseconds used for time calculation and measurement. *1 millisecond (1 ms) – cycle time for frequency 1  kHz; duration of light for typical photo flash strobe; time taken for sound wave to travel about 34 cm; repetition interval of GPS C/A PN code *1 millisecond – time taken ...
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Service Level Agreement
A service-level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a service provider and a customer. Particular aspects of the service – quality, availability, responsibilities – are agreed between the service provider and the service user. The most common component of an SLA is that the services should be provided to the customer as agreed upon in the contract. As an example, Internet service providers and telcos will commonly include service level agreements within the terms of their contracts with customers to define the level(s) of service being sold in plain language terms. In this case, the SLA will typically have a technical definition of '' mean time between failures'' (MTBF), '' mean time to repair'' or '' mean time to recovery'' (MTTR); identifying which party is responsible for reporting faults or paying fees; responsibility for various data rates; throughput; jitter; or similar measurable details. Overview A service-level agreement is an agreement between two or m ...
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Single Point Of Failure
A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that would Cascading failure, stop the entire system from working if it were to fail. The term single point of failure implies that there is not a backup or redundant option that would enable the system to continue to function without it. SPOFs are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or Reliability engineering, reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system. If there is a SPOF present in a system, it produces a potential interruption to the system that is substantially more disruptive than an error would elsewhere in the system. Overview Systems can be made robust by adding Redundancy (engineering), redundancy in all potential SPOFs. Redundancy can be achieved at various levels. The assessment of a potential SPOF involves identifying the critical components of a complex system that would provoke a total systems failure in case of wikt:malfunction, malfunction. ...
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Continuous Availability
Continuous availability is an approach to computer system and application design that protects users against downtime, whatever the cause and ensures that users remain connected to their documents, data files and business applications. Continuous availability describes the information technology methods to ensure business continuity. In early days of computing, availability was not considered business critical. With the increasing use of mobile computing, global access to online business transactions and business-to-business communication, continuous availability is increasingly important based on the need to support customer access to information systems. Solutions to continuous availability exists in different forms and implementations depending on the software and hardware manufacturer. The goal of the discipline is to reduce the user or business application downtime, which can have a severe impact on business operations. Inevitably, such downtime can lead to loss of productivit ...
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Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of Scheduling (computing), processor time, mass storage, peripherals, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computerfrom cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers. , Android (operating system), Android is the most popular operating system with a 46% market share, followed ...
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Middleware
Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to implement communication and input/output, so they can focus on the specific purpose of their application. It gained popularity in the 1980s as a solution to the problem of how to link newer applications to older legacy systems, although the term had been in use since 1968. In distributed applications The term is most commonly used for software that enables communication and management of data in distributed applications. An IETF workshop in 2000 defined middleware as "those services found above the transport (i.e. over TCP/IP) layer set of services but below the application environment" (i.e. below application-level APIs). In this more specific sense ''middleware'' can be described as the hyphen ("-") in '' client-server'', or the ''-to-'' ...
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