Distributed Systems and Centralized Systems
Distributed System and Centralized Failures
By
Kentrell Lanier
POS/355
March 28, 2014
Paul Borkowski
Distributed System and Centralized System Failures
Distributed system is many computers linked together that take on different tasks and act like one big computer. Distributed system is found in business across the world. When computers are linked together they share the same database and server. Distributed system is constructed for resource sharing, computation speedup, reliability, and communication Distributed system have different names for the computers in the system. Names such as sites, nodes, computers, machines, and host. Each names goes to a computer that’s part of the system. Resource sharing is when computers link up and they have different data any user can use the data form any computer in the system. Computation speedup is when the system recognize that one computer is over worked so the system have computers that’s have less duties to perform the tasks. Computation speedup help the system from crashing and tasks are preformed quicker. Distributed systems are more reliable because if one computer crash or fail the others can share its responsibilities and system will continue running smoothly. By computers being link together the users can communicate between each other.
Two Types of failure
When dealing with computers there are two types of failures. You can have a hard drive failure or a software failure. A hard drive failure is when the disk drive fails to function and the information cannot be retrieved. The common cause of a hard drive failure is heat, damage to the computer, power surge, water damage, corrupted files, and human error. Software failure is more common than hard drive failures. Software failure sometime harder to fix than a hard drive failure. A hard drive failure you can replace the hard drive or find the human error and correct it. A software failure can come from many computer errors. Some of the computer error come from corrupt or missing registry file or malware/spyware. These errors make software failure hard to fix. A failure can be a transient fault, intermittent fault, and permanent fault. A transient fault occur regularly it is when you have network connectivity issues or service unavailability. Intermittent faults are faults that occur at intervals and are hard to fix. The best time to fix an intermittent fault is when the fault is occurring. Permanent fault is constant and is not related to internal (computation activity) or external (environment).
Distributed System faults
Four types of faults that a distributed system can have are crash, omission, timing and response failure. The hard drive and the operating system can cause a crash. A crash is when the computer cannot boot up the operating system. There are physical evidence that will help you determine if it’s a logical failure (operating system) or physical Failure (hard drive). If there no physical evidence and the computer still crash it still can be a logical or physical failure. There are different program out there that can help you solve this problem. These program monitors your hard drive and operating system. These program monitor the system to prevent crashes. If the computer crash and it is a physical failure the most likely solution is replace the hard drive. If it is a logical failure (software) you can run an