Practical ICT Experience – Flexibility – Worldwide References

Knowledge Evolution
Design of High Availability Systems & Software
Course ID: EPOL-10:023
Duration: 2 days
Number of participants: recommended optimum 15, maximum 25
Course objectives
The primary goal of this course is to give participants the skills necessary to design software for real time
and embedded computer systems that must relentlessly provide service despite the occurrence
of internal and external faults. This is a very practical, results-oriented course that will provide knowledge
and skills that can be applied immediately.
This course examines the high-level design of embedded systems and software that are to provide their
services at near-continuous availability.
High availability systems must tolerate both expected and unexpected faults. Their design is based
on redundant hardware and software combined in ways that will achieve “five-nines” (99.999%) or greater
availability, equivalent to less than 1 second of downtime per day. Basic hardware N-plexing and voting
issues are discussed, followed by an in-depth study of a number of backward error recovery fault tolerance
techniques including static N-version programming, Checkpoint-Rollback, Process Pairs, and Recovery
Blocks. The class continues with several forward error recovery techniques. Technical issues such
as failover management, data replication, and software design defects, are addressed in depth. Many
real-world examples are presented.
This course is far from a general course about system or software design theory, but rather it is highly
focused on the design of embedded systems and software that must make their services available
at all times, with less than 5 minutes per year of downtime.
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