Network Reliability Engineering

Sat May 18 23:56:45 UTC 2002

Check out this book:

 "High-Availability Network Fundamentals"
 Cisco Press
 ISBN 1-58713-017-3

Despite its Cisco Press origin, the book is 99% vendor-neutral and applies
to any equipment. It helps you calculate MTBF-based availability of entire
network paths, factoring in various types of redundancy. You're on your own
collecting actual MTBF data from vendors, but this book may help you put it
together into something sensible.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pete Kruckenberg [mailto:pete at kruckenberg.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 6:13 PM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Network Reliability Engineering
> 
> 
> 
> I'm looking for some good reference materials to do some 
> "reliability engineering" calculations and projections.
> 
> This is to justify increased redundancy, and I want to
> include quantifiable numbers based on MTBF data and other 
> reliability factors, kind of a scientific justification 
> instead of just the typical emotional appeal using analyst/vendor FUD.
> 
> I'd appreciate references on how to do this in a network 
> environment (what data to collect, how to collect it, how to 
> analyze, etc). Also any data (or rules of thumb) on typical 
> MTBFs for network events that I won't find on vendor product 
> slicks (like what's the MTBF on IOS, or human-caused service 
> outages of various types, etc).
> 
> If someone has put together something remotely like this
> that they'd care to share, that'd be incredibly helpful.
> 
> Thanks.
> Pete.
> 
> 