If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?
Telecommunications and networking devices are designed with a strong emphasis on redundancy. On top of that, the network architectures created using these systems are designed with multiple paths and redundant links.
This has an interesting implication on the software running on these systems. When software fails due to defects in code, it doesn’t make the news. At least it doesn’t make the news like the latest security breach in a browser or software problem in a car.
However, can no news of software failures be assumed to be good news? Dig a bit deeper into the system logs and you will get some answers.
The major issue is that network architects are forced to design by taking failures into account. This not only increases the complexity of the networks, but financially this means higher costs for equipment, management, maintenance and services.
The systems are designed to minimize downtime through two basic approaches:
- Recoverable systems – No human intervention, but downtime and outage till the problem is rectified.
- Highly available systems – Keep running even during failures with hot backups.
For recoverable systems, the main issue will be the downtime with the impact being that the systems are unable to meet the 99,999% (“five nines”) high availability SLAs. The highly available systems on the other hand require replicating information which is directly proportional to cost and complexity.
The best solution is then to ensure the integrity of software that runs on these systems. Ensure that code is defect-free; avoid crash causing errors such as illegal memory accesses, null pointer dereferences, performance degrading problems such as memory leaks and prevent security vulnerabilities through buffer overflows and insecure handling of data.
We recently discussed the value of effective software analysis for telecommunications systems based on the current development trends in complex telecommunications and networking systems.
For software failures in telecommunications systems, no news is not good news; it probably just means that sooner or later, it will be news.