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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - USENIX Annual
Conference, General Session - June 2000
Towards Availability Benchmarks: A Case Study of Software RAID
Systems
Aaron Brown and David A. Patterson, University of California at
Berkeley
Abstract
Benchmarks have historically played a key role in guiding the progress
of computer science systems research and development, but have
traditionally neglected the areas of availability, maintainability, and
evolutionary growth, areas that have recently become critically
important in high-end system design. As a first step in addressing this
deficiency, we introduce a general methodology for benchmarking the
availability of computer systems. Our methodology uses fault injection
to provoke situations where availability may be compromised, leverages
existing performance benchmarks for workload generation and data
collection, and can produce results in both detail-rich graphical
presentations or in distilled numerical summaries. We apply the
methodology to measure the availability of the software RAID systems
shipped with Linux, Solaris 7 Server, and Windows 2000 Server, and find
that the methodology is powerful enough not only to quantify the impact
of various failure conditions on the availability of these systems, but
also to unearth their design philosophies with respect to transient
errors and recovery policy.
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