About Reliability, Availability, And Serviceability Features; Hot-Pluggable And Hot-Swappable Components - Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V445 Server Administration Manual

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 encompasses the ability of a system to both recover in the
presence of a fault with no impact to the operational environment – and restore in
the presence of a fault, with minimal impact to the operational environment.
Serviceability refers to the time it takes to diagnose and complete the repair policy
of a system, following a system failure.
Together, reliability, availability, and serviceability features provide near continuous
system operation.
To deliver high levels of reliability, availability, and serviceability, the Sun Fire V445
server offers the following features:
Hot-pluggable disk drives
Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies, fan trays, and USB components
Sun Advanced Lights Out Manager (ALOM) system controller with SSH
connections for all remote monitoring and control
Environmental monitoring
Automatic system restoration (ASR) capabilities for PCI cards and memory
DIMMs
Hardware watchdog mechanism and externally initiated reset (XIR) capability
Internal hardware disk mirroring (RAID 0/1)
Support for disk and network multipathing with automatic failover
Error correction and parity checking for improved data integrity
Easy access to all internal replaceable components
Full in-rack serviceability for all components

Hot-Pluggable and Hot-Swappable Components

Sun Fire V445 hardware is designed to support hot-plugging of internal disk drives.
By using the proper software commands, you can install or remove these
components while the system is running. The server also supports hot-swapping of
98 Sun Fire V445 Server Administration Guide • September 2007