Check out this book: "High-Availability Network Fundamentals" Cisco Press ISBN 1-58713-017-3 Despite its Cisco Press origin, the book is 99% vendor-neutral and applies to any equipment. It helps you calculate MTBF-based availability of entire network paths, factoring in various types of redundancy. You're on your own collecting actual MTBF data from vendors, but this book may help you put it together into something sensible.

-----Original Message----- From: Pete Kruckenberg [mailto:pete@kruckenberg.com] Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 6:13 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Network Reliability Engineering

I'm looking for some good reference materials to do some "reliability engineering" calculations and projections.

This is to justify increased redundancy, and I want to include quantifiable numbers based on MTBF data and other reliability factors, kind of a scientific justification instead of just the typical emotional appeal using analyst/vendor FUD.

I'd appreciate references on how to do this in a network environment (what data to collect, how to collect it, how to analyze, etc). Also any data (or rules of thumb) on typical MTBFs for network events that I won't find on vendor product slicks (like what's the MTBF on IOS, or human-caused service outages of various types, etc).

If someone has put together something remotely like this that they'd care to share, that'd be incredibly helpful.

Thanks. Pete.