Microsoft (Sponsor)

Microsoft kindly accepted to sponsor the project. Brendan Murphy is willing to attend the technical meetings to follow up tightly the progress of the Project. He is also a member of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Dependability Benchmarking of the IFIP Working Group 10.4. He is thus interested in two ways: the results will be directly usable by Microsoft and may serve as work basis for the SIG.

Brendan Murphy is a Researcher at Microsoft Research Center in Cambridge UK. He joined from Compaq Corporation (previously Digital), Ayr Scotland in August 1999, previously having worked for Digital in Galway Ireland, UNISYS (Scotland and US) and ICL (West Gorton, Manchester). He graduated from Newcastle University.

At Compaq he developed and managed the DPP program (now renamed to CARS). DPP was based around an automated data collection process, continuously capturing behavioural information from production systems on customer sites. The process was originally developed to understand why improvements in hardware reliability were not resulting in corresponding improvements in the system behaviour on the customer sites. DPP subsequently became the corporate program measuring the reliability and availability of customer system (hardware and operating system), providing information for product and process improvements.

One important feature of the program was that the data was often shared with customers providing an excellent verification of analysis techniques. The process was subsequently developed to provide content for high availability service offerings, measuring and reporting nodal and cluster availability for systems running OpenVMS, Tru64 Unix and Windows NT.

His research interests lie in the area of System Dependability which encompasses Reliability and Availability. He is specifically interested in looking at the system as the total solution managed within production environments. Whereas System Dependability research has traditionally addressed the needs of the fault tolerant and telecommunications world, excluding the vast majority of users whose business are increasingly becoming mission-critical. He is Microsoft’s world-wide representative in the area of dependability research (e.g. the IFIP Working Group on Dependability).