Mendosus: A SAN-Based Fault-Injection Test-Bed for the Construction of Highly Available Network Services

We describe Mendosus, a SAN-based fault-injection test-bed that supports the emulation of LAN-based systems. Our goal is to provide a test-bed for service designers to systematically assess the impact of end-to-end design decisions on the availability and reliability of network services in the presence of realistic fault scenarios. As such, our current implementation is just a first step toward this vision; currently, we are working to extend Mendosus to be able to emulate a rich set of networks, including wireless systems and WAN-connected systems. An emulator must work in real-time, providing a platform that looks and performs as similar to the deployed platform as possible; Mendosus relies critically on the high performance of the underlying SAN system to achieve this goal. Preliminary measurements show that we should easily be able to emulate 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s Ethernet LANs using our VIA-based implementation.