Three reliability engineering techniques and their application to evaluating the availability of IT systems: An introduction

We present a brief introduction to three reliability engineering techniques: failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis; reliability block diagrams; and fault tree analysis. We demonstrate the use of one of these techniques, reliability block diagrams, in evaluating the availability of information technology (IT) systems through a case study involving an IT system supported by a three-tier Web-server configuration. © Copyright 2008 by International Business Machines Corporation.