Modeling and analysis of two-component cluster system

Businesses today are becoming increasingly dependent on information technology (IT) to meet business-critical demands. The more available a computer system is, the more value it can provide to its users. In many cases high availability (HA) requirement becomes as critical as high performance. Cluster computing has been attracting more and more attention from both the industrial and the academic world for its enormous computing power and scalability. High availability features need to be included to ensure that cluster computing environments can provide continuous services. In order to validate and compare the different techniques, it is often necessary to build models of the system. A typical availability modeling method is based on analytical formalisms such as fault tree, Markov chains, Stochastic Petri Net, etc. In this paper we describe (1) a two-component cluster configuration, and (2) an availability model of that system using Markov modeling techniques.