Glossary - Sunfire V480 Administration Manual

100BASE-T
Adapter
ASR
Controller
DIMM
DIMM group
Dual-processor/memory module
ECC
Fast Ethernet
Fault resilience
Fault tolerance
FC-AL
I2C
High availability
Host-bus adapter
Hot-plug
Mirroring
Multipathing
NFS
PCI
TM
Sun Fire V480 Server
Just the Facts
Sun Proprietary and Confidential - Internal Use Only

Glossary

See Fast Ethernet.
A host bus adapter or interface which plugs into a PCI slot to provide connectivity,
i.e. to networks, storage, graphics or other I/O devices
Automatic System Recovery. A RAS feature that initiates a system reboot sequence
that bypasses failed system components or a software failure.
A microprocessor based device which is dedicated to a specific task, esp. I/O and is
embeddded within a host-bus adapter or external (storage) array. The term
'controller' is often used synonymously with host-bus adapter.
Dual in-line memory module. A memory unit that is available in a range of
capacities, such as 128 MB, 256 MB, 512 MB, or 1 GB.
A group of four DIMMs.
The basic component of processing capability for the Sun Fire V480 server. Each
module is comprised of exactly two UltraSPARC III+ microprocessors, a variable
amount of memory depending upon the quantity and density of DIMMs selected,
and the interconnect logic.
Error correcting code
IEEE standard for 100-Mb/second Ethernet. This technology supports a data
transfer rate of 100 megabits per second over special grades of twisted-pair wiring.
Capability of a system to mask many individual errors, but not all. This approach
generally requires redundancy of some components and additional software. An
example would be the dual path capability and automatic failover for storage and
networks. Another term for 'high availability'.
Capability of a system to mask any individual point of failure. This type of system
is typically implemented with redundancy of components and synchronization of
clock signals to maintain each unit in 'lock step' with it s counterpart.
Fibre Channel arbitrated loop. A loop topology used with Fibre.
A bus used for environmental monitoring.
Capability of a system to mask many individual points of failure or to significantly
compensate for them. This type of system is built upon standard components with
limited hardware and/or software components to minimize the impact of failures.
Generally, this type of system is less costly than a fault tolerant system.
Please see Adapter
A component that can be electrically safe to remove or add while the system is still
running. Typically, the system must be rebooted before the hot-plug component is
configured.
Maintaining a redundant, logical copy of a disk volume for higher availability. Also
known as volume shadowing or RAID 1.
A higher availability option which provides two independent paths to storage and/or
networks. An intermediate software layer is generally required to mask the failure
of one path from the application. When both paths are functional, higher bandwidth
and throughput is possible as a secondary benefit beyond higher availability.
Sun's distributed computing file system, i.e. network file system
Peripheral component interconnect. An industry-standard for connecting peripherals
such as disk drives, tape drives and other external devices.
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