Sharif Digital Repository

The development of communication infrastructure in power systems has provided the grid with the availability of accurate information and has increased the reliability of the grid and its responsibility to disturbances. However, there have been some concerns about the negative impacts of the reliance on the information infrastructure. Inadequacies in the control and communication systems have been reported to be the contributing factors to situations that led to major blackouts. The functionality and reliability of the power grid is undoubtedly influenced by its communication infrastructure. In this thesis we are trying to model and analyze the failures that may occur in a power system and... 

Data storage systems are an essential part of any Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Unavailability of these systems can directly lead to service disruption to customers and can be very costly in enterprise applications such as ebanking, online reservation systems, and mobile services. Modeling availability of disk subsystem is a major step in design of data storage systems. Previous modeling techniques have mainly focused on data unavailability or data loss due to double or multiple disk failures. In this thesis, we present both simulation and analytical modeling techniques to investigate the effect of serviceability on the overall availability of disk subsystems. The proposed... 

In this study, redundancy allocation problem for a system with y subsystem including k-out-of-n structure is investigated. Due to existing repairable components in each subsystem, the model consists of selecting number of repairman and redundancy level for each subsystem. The model is constructed based on Markovian process and the goal is maximization of steady-state availability under constraints such as cost, weight, and volume. In this model, two type of costs are considered; cost of employing repairmen and cost of preparing components and decision variables of the model are number of repairman and number of component in each subsystem.The model is located into integer non-linear... 

Vulnerability of SRAM-based FPGAs to soft errors signals the importance of applying fault-tolerant methods in FPGAs used in safety-critical applications. Previous methods to protect SRAM-based FPGAs impose significant area and power overheads. Additionally, they suffer from susceptibility of configuration bits to Single Event-Multiple Upsets (SEMU). This thesis presents a Highly Available Fault-Tolerant Architecture (HAFTA) to protect SRAM-based FPGA designs against SEMUs in both configuration and user bits. In HAFTA, the entire design is duplicated and the main and replica flip-flops are compared at each clock cycle to detect any possible mismatch. To save the latest correct state of the... 

Availability of the service delivered by cloud providers is one of the most important QoS factors of the service level agreements between providers and customers. Since current Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers use virtualization technology to manage data centers,virtual data centers (VDCs) have become a popular infrastructure for cloud computing.Evaluation of VDCs gives cloud providers the oportunnity to improve their service by investigating the effect of different parameters on their service.As a result, they can allocate appropriate amount of resources, and apply better resource management policies.In this study, in order to evaluate different aspects of VDCs, including service... 

The role of natural gas compressor stations, is to maintain the gas pressure at the level required for gas transportation along the pipeline to the distribution system. In Iran, residential heating demand, has a large share in natural gas consumption. Thus the demand of natural gas would be greater in cold winter days in comparison to other seasons. Due to this intense demand fluctuations, geographical diversity of demand, long distances between supply and demand points, supply and demand mismatches and long term investment, there is an intense reliability and load factor issues within these systems operations. In this thesis, natural gas compressor stations are modeled and installation and... 

The daily growth of cloud computing usage for data based applications and Internet services has caused many challenges in the sense of storage cost, data access performance, QoS provision such as availability, scalability, pay-as-you-go model conformation and etc. Data replication is one of the most important mechanisms for data management in distributed systems. It creates some replicas of data and distributes them to the network. The number of replicas, the time for creating a new replica, the way of their distribution among the nodes and replica replacement strategy in the case of storage unavailability are some important challenges in data replication context. Replication is extensively... 

With ever increasing amount of digital data, numerous efforts have been made in recent years towards improving reliability and availability of data storage systems. Previous studies have reported significant gap between estimated failure rates and observed failure rates in the field. This gap is mainly due to neglecting correlated failures in Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAIDs). Proposing a model to consider correlated failures can significantly improve reliability models. In this thesis, we present a reliability model which considers correlated failures in RAID arrays. In the propose model, we use a correlation probability to take into account the correlation of failures between... 

Reliability and availability are one of the sensitive and significant points in each maintenance system. Due to the nature of bus system failures, that almost consist of large percentage of possibility risk factors is the systems maintenance, in this study for implementing our proposed model, the bus rapid transit garage-line1 were selected. This model is to provide solutions in strategic and operational levels in the network's garage in several sessions. The solutions include decisions about the capacity of human resources in the workshop system, determine the communication policies with suppliers of spare parts and human resources training policies by the standard scoring system, the... 

In cloud computing services, high availability is one of the most quality requirements that it is necessary to maintain customer confidence. This requires various fault tolerance mechanisms for coping with software and hardware failures.In this thesis, after reviewing previous research, eight different scenarios was designed for availability evaluation of redundant openstack private clouds, represented by RBDs and Markov chains, hierarchically assembled.Based on the availability and downtime results obtained from the scenarios and cost consideration of company, best architecture for openstack is implemented.For real world modeling, we tried to collect and analyze the hardware and... 

From small businesses to large organizations and corporations, data is the most valuable and most vulnerable asset. The exponential explosion of digital data, known as Big Data, has evolved data storage industry and mandates new solutions for handling dependability and performance demands. Now Exa-scale datacenters employ millions of storage media that translates to multiple failures per hour. The storage design problem gets more dimensions by the emerge of Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs) and Solid-State Drives (SSDs) that have limited endurance. Both industry and academy continuously struggle to evaluate and improve the dependability of data storage systems and minimize the chance of data... 

Using single RAID HW-Controller in data storage systems can become a single point-of-failure. Hence, it will affect system availability. As a result, in enterprise-class storage systems, utilizing dual-HW-Controller architecture for managing redundant array of independent disks is prevalent to enhance performance and reliability. Employing such architecture, however, faces major challenges. One of these challenges is the synchronization of dual-HW-based controllers in case RAID arrays revealing erratic behaviours. No thorough study has been done for evaluating dual-controller architecture synchronization mechanisms and its performance. In this thesis, different configurations of enterprise...