Recovery Oriented Computing

Tuesday, Jul. 13 2004 | Author: DarkBlue

Imagine a computer that never crashes. Or a network immune to attack…

[Few] believe that speed is the only problem of computer hardware and software. Current systems crash and freeze so frequently that people become violent. Fast but flaky should not be our 21st century legacy.

Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) takes the perspective that hardware faults, software bugs, and operator errors are facts to be coped with, not problems to be solved. By concentrating on Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) rather than Mean Time to Failure (MTTF), ROC reduces recovery time and thus offers higher availability. Since a large portion of system administration is dealing with failures, ROC may also reduce total cost of ownership. One to two orders of magnitude reduction in cost mean that the purchase price of hardware and software is now a small part of the total cost of ownership.

If we embrace availability and maintainability, systems of the future may compete on recovery performance rather than just SPEC performance, and on total cost of ownership rather than just system price. Such a change may restore our pride in the architectures and operating systems we craft.

It seems that, software and hardware engineers are getting very excited over the prospect of autonomic computing — systems built to recognize and recover from their own flaws without tying down a human administrator in the process… systems that “heal” themselves in the event of a failure.

Personally, I’m looking forward to feeling nostalgic for the blue screen.

Share and Enjoy

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One Response for "Recovery Oriented Computing"

JC

July 13th, 2004 at 8:02 pm
1

The healing computer concept is really only useful on servers, which have a fairly limited number of possible problems.

Ya know… if you follow just a few simple rules, your PC will almost never crash.

1) don’t turn it on.
2) ever.
that’s all.
but not very helpful… how about this:

1) use a UPS. Most of the freezes and lockups you experience are due to little power fluctuations. With a UPS, you’re running on a battery — stable and consistant. And they’re available for under 50 bucks now. (and plug your damned modem into it, too. I’m tired of people calling me to replace their fried modems)

2) just because it has a cute kitten/sexy girl/jesus thing doesn’t mean it’s not going to screw up your computer. Badly programmed screensavers and other crap like that are the absolute bane of computing.

3) ditto for any kind of toolbar/deskbar/nifty thing that runs in your system tray

4) keep the antivirus software up to date, and windows update current.

5) I don’t care if it’s from someone you know, don’t run email attachments without taking precautions.

6) Poorly made hardware, intended for older systems, or too new for your computer, with crappy drivers, is begging for a problem.

7) upgrade to 2000 or XP (or get a mac)

8) Turn off ActiveDesktop. Don’t use it. If you want to use a jpg as your background image, open it up and save it as a bmp first.

9) Run spybot S&D and Ad-Aware weekly. Ignore the cookies. Don’t get hung up on the cookies. Repeat, the cookies are bloody irrelavent unless you’re a slavering lunatic who thinks the black helicopters put them there.

10) No, you do NOT want to install that thing that popped up on the web page and says you have to install it to view the content. If it’s not by Macromedia, Apple, Microsoft, or Real, you probably shouldn’t even be considering it, and even then, think thrice.

11) Avoid software that isn’t produced by large commercial vendors like MS, Adobe, etc. They test their systems with other major software packages to find and avoid conflicts. The neato game your cousin Bob’s nephew’s girlfriend’s dad wrote may conflict with something. Large open source projects are usually ok… but if you’re the sort of person who’d need this info, I can’t think of any open source software other than OpenOffice you might be running.

12) Read ForeverGeek every single day, and comment intelligently. If something breaks, Scrivs will be so greatful that you’re not being a pain in the ass that he’ll help you fix it. ::grin::