A study on system availability vs system administration efforts with mathematical models

Two mathematical models are developed in this paper to study effectiveness system administration efforts on improvement system availability, based the assumption that there exists transitional state for a computer system in operation before it is brought down by some hardware or software problems and with intensified system administration efforts, it is to discover and fix the problems in time to bring the system back normal state before it is down Markov chain is used to simulate the transition of system states. A conclusion is made that increasing system administration efforts may be a cost-effective way to meet requirements for improvement on system availability, but higher demand on this aspect still has to be met by advanced technologies.