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4
Continuous availability and
Chapter 4.
manageability
This chapter provides information about IBM Power Systems design features that help lower
the total cost of ownership (TCO). The advanced IBM RAS (Reliability, Availability, and
Serviceability) technology allows the possibility to improve your architecture's TCO by
reducing unplanned down time.
In April 2008, IBM announced the newest Power Architecture technology-based server: the
Power 595, incorporating innovative IBM POWER6 processor technology to deliver both
outstanding performance and enhanced RAS capabilities. The IBM Power Servers
complement the IBM POWER5 processor-based server family, coupling technology
innovation with new capabilities designed to ease administrative burdens and increase
system use. In addition, IBM PowerVM delivers virtualization technologies for IBM Power
Systems product families, enabling individual servers to run dozens or even hundreds of
mission-critical applications.
In IBMs view, servers must be designed to avoid both planned and unplanned outages, and to
maintain a focus on application uptime. From an RAS standpoint, servers in the IBM Power
Systems family include features to increase availability and to support new levels of
virtualization, building upon the leading-edge RAS features delivered in the IBM eServer p5,
pSeries and iSeries families of servers.
IBM POWER6 processor-based systems have a number of new features that enable systems
to dynamically adjust when issues arise that threaten availability. Most notably, POWER6
processor-based systems introduce the POWER6 Processor Instruction Retry suite of tools,
which includes Processor Instruction Retry, Alternate Processor Recovery, Partition
Availability Prioritization, and Single Processor Checkstop. Taken together, in many failure
scenarios these features allow a POWER6 processor-based system to recover with no impact
on a partition using a failing core.
This chapter discusses several features that are based on the benefits available when using
AIX and IBM i as the operating system. Support for these features when using Linux for
Power should be verified with your Linux supplier.
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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2008. All rights reserved.
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