Method and system for proactively reducing the outage time of a computer system

• US 6,978,398 B2
• Filed: 08/15/2001
• Issued: 12/20/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 08/15/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Harper, Richard Edwin, Hunter, Steven Wade
• Primary Examiner(s): Badermann, Scott
• Assistant Examiner(s): LOHN, JOSHUA A
• Application Number:
  US09/929,143
• Publication Number:
  US 20030036882A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,588 Days
• Field of Search: 714/13, 714/15, 714/47, 714/38
• US Class Current: 714/13
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/1662 the resynchronized component or unit being a persistent storage device re-synchronization of failed mirror storage G06F11/2082; rebuild or reconstruction of parity RAID storage G06F11/1008
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2028 eliminating a faulty processor or activating a spare
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/203 using migration
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2035 without idle spare hardware
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2046 where the redundant components share persistent storage G06F11/2043 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2097 maintaining the standby controller/processing unit updated initialisation or re-synchronisation thereof G06F11/1658 and subgroups
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3466 Performance evaluation by tracing or monitoring
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2201/875 Monitoring of systems including the internet
• CPC Class Codes: G21D 3/007 Expert systems

Abstract

A method (and system) of reducing a time for a computer system to recover from a degradation of performance in a hardware or a software in at least one first node of the computer system, includes monitoring a state of the at least one first node, and based on the monitoring, transferring a state of the at least one first node to a second node prior to the degradation in performance of the hardware or the software of the at least one first node.

Claims

1. A method of reducing a time for a computer system to recover from a degradation of performance in a hardware or a software in at least one first node of said computer system, comprising:

monitoring a state of said at least one first node;

predicting an outage of said hardware or said software based on monitoring;

based on said monitoring, transferring a state of said at least one first node to a second node prior to said degradation in performance of said hardware or said software of said at least one first node;

proactively invoking a state migration functionality to reduce said recovery time, wherein said proactively invoking includes migrating a dynamic state to stable storage of said second node, said second node being accessible to a recovering agent, to reduce an amount of time required by said recovering agent; and

connecting said at least one first node and said second node to a shared memory containing a stale state of the at least one first node and a redo log, wherein said shared memory includes at least one of a shared storage medium, a shared storage disk and a shared network,

wherein said degradation of performance comprises one of an outage and a failure,

wherein said second node selectively includes an application running corresponding to an application failing on said at least one first node while the at least one first node is still operational,

wherein said state transfer from said at least one first node to said second node occurs while the at least one first node is still operational, and

wherein said predicting comprises providing a failure predictor on at least one of said at least one first node and said second node, for commanding the at least one first node to start an application if not already running while the at least one first node is still operational, and commanding the second node to begin reading a state of said at least one node and redo log from the shared memory while the at least one first node is still operational.