Distributed System Failures

Distributed System Failures

A distributed system is a collection of processors which do not in any way share memory or a clock, but instead each of these processors contains its own local memory. These processors can communicate with each other through various communication lines, such as phone lines, as well as through high-speed buses. Distributed systems provide the user the access to resources in which the system provides. Sometimes distributed systems can suffer from many different types of hardware failure. This is why it is so important that a distributed system is fault tolerant, which means that it can recovery from a variety of component failures without performing incorrect actions (Google Code University, 2012). In order for a distributed system to be fault tolerant, it must be able to detect the failures, and then reconfigure the system. After the failure has been corrected and repaired, the system has to once again reconfigure. In a distributed system, there are a few main types of failures which may occur:

• Undeliverable Messages Failures: This is where a message is deemed undeliverable, due to either the recipient is down when the message arrives, or because the recipient and sender are in completely different components of a network partition.

• Communication Failures: These failures may cause processes at other sites to stop communicating.

• Site Failures: When a site experiences a system failure, processing stops abruptly and the contents of volatile storage are destroyed (Microsoft Research, 2012).

• Network Partition Failure: This is a network fragments into two or more disjointed sub-networks within which messages can be sent, but between which messages are lost (Google Code University, 2012).

Centralized systems are completely opposite of a distributed system, where a distributed system is a collection of processors which contains their own memories and communicate together through various lines. A centralizes system...