What is the role for Fault Tolerant systems in this High
Availability World?
Brendan Murphy
Microsoft Research
Examination of the failures occurring on computers used in production
environments goes a long way in explaining the market's lack of
interest in Fault tolerant systems, which traditionally focus on
hardware failures. To emphasize this point, the talk looks at the
dependability features built into Windows 2000, which were based
on the analysis of failures occurring on systems running NT 4.
But hardware failures have not gone away and are still
occurring with possibly increasing frequency; this talk analyzes possible
reasons for the increase in hardware failures and looks at whether this
provides an opportunity for Fault Tolerant systems.