Fault Tolerance: Theory and Concepts

Chapter briefly introduces how reliabilityReliability of the system might be considered in combination with fault toleranceFault tolerance. Having introduced hardware faultsHardware faults in the previous chapter, we present in this chapter the elements of theory of fault toleranceFault tolerance and reliabilityReliability and show how the hardware components of a computing system can be made more resilient to hardware faultsHardware faults. We then introduce the mathematical definition of reliabilityReliability and show how to calculate the reliabilityReliability of a system according to the topology of its components. Then we describe the connection between reliabilityReliability and fault toleranceFault tolerance, i.e. we show how applying different types of redundancyRedundancy, implemented in software and hardware, increases the reliabilityReliability of a system. Also some design advices are given.