IBM Z10 EC manual Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability RAS, RAS Design Focus

Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS)

In today’s on demand environment, downtime is not only unwelcome—it’s costly. If your applications aren’t consis- tently available, your business suffers. The damage can extend well beyond the fi nancial realm into key areas of customer loyalty, market competitiveness and regulatory compliance. High on the list of critical business require- ments today is the need to keep applications up and run- ning in the event of planned or unplanned disruptions to your systems.

While some servers are thought of offering weeks or even months of up time, System z thinks of this in terms of achieving years. The z10 EC continues our commitment to deliver improvements in hardware Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) with every new System z server. They include microcode driver enhancements, dynamic segment sparing for memory and fi xed HSA. The z10 EC is a server that can help keep applications up and running in the event of planned or unplanned disruptions to the system.

The System z10 EC is designed to deliver industry lead- ing reliability, availability and security our customers have come to expect from System z servers. System z10 EC RAS is designed to reduce all sources of outages by reducing unscheduled, scheduled and planned outages. Planned outages are further designed to be reduced with the introduction of concurrent I/O drawer add and eliminating pre-planning requirements. These features are designed to reduce the need for a Power-on-Reset (POR) and help eliminate the need to deactivate/activate/IPL a logical partition.

RAS Design Focus

High Availability (HA) – The attribute of a system designed to provide service during defi ned peri- ods, at acceptable or agreed upon levels and masks UNPLANNED OUTAGES from end users. It employs fault tolerance, automated failure detection, recovery, bypass reconfi guration, testing, problem and change manage- ment.

Continuous Operations (CO) – The attribute of a system designed to continuously operate and mask PLANNED OUTAGES from end users. It employs non-disruptive hard- ware and software changes, non-disruptive confi guration and software coexistence.

Continuous Availability (CA) – The attribute of a system designed to deliver non-disruptive service to the end user 7 days a week, 24 HOURS A DAY (there are no planned or unplanned outages). It includes the ability to recover from a site disaster by switching computing to a second site.

43