High availability in cloud computing services is essential for maintaining customer confidence and avoiding revenue losses due to SLA violation penalties. Since the software and hardware components of cloud infrastructures may have limited reliability, fault tolerance mechanisms are a means of achieving the necessary dependability requirements. This paper investigates the benefits of a warmstandy replication mechanism in a Eucalyptus cloud computing environment. A hierarchical heterogeneous modeling approach is used to represent a redundant architecture and compare its availability to that of a non-redundant architecture. Both hardware and software failures are considered in the proposed analytical models. The results show an enhanced dependability for the proposed redundant system, as well as a decrease in the annual downtime. The results also demonstrate that the simple replacement of hardware by more reliable machines would not produce improvements in system availability to the same extent as would the fault tolerant approach.

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