Abstract

Introduction Accurate analyses of fault-tolerance and replication mechanisms depend on an accurate model of the reliability of the systems that make them up. The overall reliability of a replication protocol, for example, depends on the probability that some fraction of the replica sites are functioning when data must be read or written. There are several important measures used to quantify system reliability, including time-to-failure (TTF), time-to- repair (TTR), availability, and reliability. Throughout this study, "failure" is defined in a distributed-environment sense; that is, as an inability to access a host. The term encompasses both hardware and software faults attributable to the host, and can include power failures and scheduled downtime. It can also be caused by offsite communications failures, ranging from temporary routing failures to problems with the physical commun

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