Reliability Testing of Applications on Windows NT

The DTS (Dependability Test Suite) fault injection tool can be used to (1) obtain fault injection-based evaluation of system reliability, (2) compare the reliability of different applications, fault tolerance middleware, and platforms, and (3) provide feedback to improve the reliability of the target applications, fault tolerance middleware, and platforms. This paper describes the architecture of the tool as well as the procedure for using the tool. Data from experiments with the DTS tool used on the Apache web server, the Microsoft IIS web server, and the Microsoft SQL Server, along with the Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) and Bell Labs watchd (part of NT-SwiFT) fault tolerance packages is presented to demonstrate the utility of the tool. The observations drawn from the data also illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the tested applications and fault tolerance packages with respect to their reliability.