Improving System Availability for Better Services

Entering the information age, the demands for online services increase dramatically. Such high demands are pushing the network systems to become more complex and making system availability a crucial requirement for both service providers and clients. The service providers are aiming to have an effective, efficient and stable service: the service should be failure resilient, be scalable to support a large group of clients and still keep acceptable performance. Whereas the clients need a “powerful” service – high performance without threats to their privacy or security. To this end, huge efforts have been made to improve the service availability issues, to detect failures, to overcome the failures introduced by bugs and scalability problems, or to provide a strong guarantee of performance, effectiveness and security. We explore the system availability problem with several network scenarios including Software Defined Networks, Data Center Networks and Cable Networks, and propose new concepts to further improve networking services’ availability.