Sun Microsystems V490 manual About Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability Features

About Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability Features

Reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) are aspects of a system’s design that affect its ability to operate continuously and to minimize the time necessary to service the system. Reliability refers to a system’s ability to operate continuously without failures and to maintain data integrity. System availability refers to the percentage of time that a system remains accessible and usable. Serviceability relates to the time it takes to restore a system to service following a system failure. Together, reliability, availability, and serviceability features provide for near continuous system operation.

To deliver high levels of reliability, availability and serviceability, the Sun Fire V490 system offers the following features:

■Hot-pluggable disk drives

■Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies

■Environmental monitoring and fault detection

■Automatic system recovery (ASR) capabilities

■Multiplexed I/O (MPxIO)

■Remote “lights out” management capability

■Hardware watchdog mechanism and externally initiated reset (XIR)

■Dual-loop enabled FC-AL subsystem

■Support for disk and network multipathing with automatic failover capability

■Error correction and parity checking for improved data integrity

Hot-Pluggable and Hot-Swappable Components

Sun Fire V490 hardware is designed to support hot-plugging of internal disk drives and hot-swapping of power supplies. With the proper software support, you can install or remove these components while the system is running. Hot-plug and hot-swap technology significantly increases the system’s serviceability and availability, by providing the ability to:

■Increase storage capacity dynamically to handle larger work loads and improve system performance

■Replace disk drives and power supplies without service disruption

For additional information about the system’s hot-pluggable and hot-swappable components—including a discussion of the differences between the two practices—see “About Hot-Pluggable and Hot-Swappable Components” on page 26.

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