Characterizing cloud computing hardware reliability

Modern day datacenters host hundreds of thousands of servers that coordinate tasks in order to deliver highly available cloud comput-ing services. These servers consist of multiple hard disks, memory modules, network cards, processors etc., each of which while care-fully engineered are capable of failing. While the probability of seeing any such failure in the lifetime (typically 3-5 years in indus-try) of a server can be somewhat small, these numbers get magni-fied across all devices hosted in a datacenter. At such a large scale, hardware component failure is the norm rather than an exception. Hardware failure can lead to a degradation in performance to end-users and can result in losses to the business. A sound under-standing of the numbers as well as the causes behind these failures helps improve operational experience by not only allowing us to be better equipped to tolerate failures but also to bring down the hardware cost through engineering, directly leading to a saving for the company. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to study server failures and hardware repairs for large data-centers. We present a detailed analysis of failure characteristics as well as a preliminary analysis on failure predictors. We hope that the results presented in this paper will serve as motivation to foster further research in this area