Operating system redundancy on an active,a stand-by or a passive basis

When applying redundancy, the system designer may find himself facing the dilemma of weighing the better life prospects of passive redundant hardware against the lower system complexity in the case of active redundant hardware. This dilemma is analyzed here by comparing the MTTF and the reliability obtained with active, stand-by and passive redundancy. The analysis makes use of Markov diagrams and a generalized reliability model that embraces all three types of redundancy and covers all types of failure which can occur in practice.