Embedded diagnostics are critical to high-availability systems

Human lives can hang in the balance when it comes to the reliability of some high-availability systems, such as 911 emergency call handling, police and fire dispatching systems, and aviation control systems. Others like credit card authorization and stock trading systems are simply mission-critical. When they go down, millions of dollars can be at stake.

A new white paper by ASSET’s Larry Osborn, technical product manager, processor-controlled test, and Alan Sguigna, vice president of marketing and sales, takes a look at the growing range of systems that are thought of as high-availability systems. The white paper, which is titled Embedded Diagnostics for Highly Available Systems, examines how manufacturers can improve the reliability and availability of their products by embedding diagnostic capabilities into them.

The white paper points out that determining the root cause(s) of faults and failures is one of three key first steps in improving the reliability of systems. Of course, monitoring for faults, identifying failures and determining root causes is an iterative process that takes place over the whole of a system’s useful life. Embedded diagnostics plays a critical role in accomplishing this.

The white paper presents several case studies from various industry sectors, including telecom, computing and semiconductors. It also includes a discussion of the economics of high-availability. (See the figure below which details the cost-per-hour for server downtime in various applications.)

Cost of server outage downtime. Click here to enlarge.

Click here to download the entire white paper and to review the other free white papers that are archived on the ASSET web site.