Predicting client/server availability

Client/server availability is a complex issue due to the many possible configurations of client/server environments and failure modes of client, server, and network devices. Such complexity makes it difficult to properly account for availability in client/server architectural design. I present a methodology and data to help design engineers evaluate client/server availability. I evaluate client/server outage data, indicate the most important outage causes in a client/server environment, and discuss methods for improving client/server availability