Availability Improvement in Software Aging Applications

Abstract

With the explosive growth in Internet technology and the emergence of new and advanced applications, assured availability of computer systems has become a critical issue. In systems with high availability requirements, software aging can cause outages resulting in high costs. The challenge is to provide the desired availability and performance at a low cost software aging applications. To counteract this issue, we propose a combined method of software rejuvenation and virtualization. Virtualization can be helpful for software rejuvenation and fail-over in the occurrence of application failures and software aging. This paper constructs a stochastic model for virtualized servers to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed combined method. The numerical derivation results are validated with the evaluation results through the SHARPE tool. The results demonstrate that our approach is a practical way to ensure uninterrupted availability and optimize performance for aging applications.