Questions for the Assignment

1. Suppose we have a power supply within a system being used in a particularly harsh environment
that causes it to have an MTBF of only 90,000 hours.
 
a. Suppose the MTTR for the power supply is 10 hours; what is the availability percentage of the
component (to 3 decimal places – XX.XXX%)?  Show your work!
 
 
b. Suppose that the power supply is part of a mobile, embedded system such that getting the
system to  a location where it could be fixed would take time, thereby increasing the MTTR for the
component to 50 hours; recalculate the availability percentage (to 3 decimal places – XX.XXX
%)?  Show your work!
 
 
c. What is the largest MTTR we can have for the power supply to reach “four nines” (99.990%)
availability?   Show your work!
 
 
 
2. Suppose a system consists of the components shown in the chart below, where each component
has the indicated availability.
 

Component Availability In %

Hard Drive .99999 99.999

Power Supply .99992 99.992

Fan .99992 99.990

System Board (1) .99800 99.800

System Board (2) .99800 99.800

System Board (3) .99800 99.800

CPU .99998 99.990

NIC .99995 99.995

 
Be sure to show your work for a, b, and c below!
 
a. What is the availability percentage of the entire system (to three decimal places)?
 
 
 
 b. We can deploy systems in parallel to increase availability.  Calculate the
availability percentage we get by deploying two of the systems from answer 2a in parallel (to
three decimal places).
 
 
 
c. Calculate the availability percentage we get by deploying three of the systems from answer 2a in
parallel (to three decimal places).
 
 
 
3. Explain the “bathtub curve” as it relates to availability.  (use your own words…do not just
cut/paste the book answer!)
 
 
4. With respect to system performance and scalability as covered in Chapter 5 (Laan):
a. Describe horizontal and vertical scaling and give the advantages/disadvantages of each.  (Use
your own words…do not just cut/paste the book answer!) 
 

 Horizontal scaling:
 
 

 Vertical scaling:
 
 
 
b. Which method needs some form of load balancing to be effective?  Explain.
 
 
5. Name and describe the 3 steps of the Identity and Access Management security pattern.
 
6. What is meant by Software Defined Compute (SDC)? List its advantages and disadvantages.
 
7. What is meant by MTTD (Mean Time To Detect (or Diagnose))? 
 
8. How should it fit into Figure 9 in Chapter 4 (Laan) with respect to calculating availability? 
 
 
9. To see how availability changes as MTTR increases, calculate the availability of a component
given the figures shown in the table below:
 
MTBF MTTR Availability (3 decimal places: XX.XXX%)

100,000 hours 20 hours  

100,000 hours 22 hours  

100,000 hours 24 hours  

100,000 hours 26 hours  

 
 
 
10. To see how availability changes as MTBF decreases, calculate the availability of a component
given the figures shown in the table below:
 

MTBF MTTR Availability (3 decimal places: XX.XXX%)

100,000 hours 20 hours  

90,000 hours 20 hours  

80,000 hours 20 hours  

70,000 hours 20 hours