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Draft Document for Review September 2, 2008 5:05 pm4405ch04 Continuous availability and manageability.fm

Chapter 4. Continuous availability and

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

Service ability) technology allows the possibility to improve your architecture’s TCO by

reducing unplanned down time.

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 transparently

without an impact on a partition using a failing core.

This chapter includes several features that are based on the benefits available when using

AIX as the operating system. Support of these features when using Linux can vary.

4.1 Reliability

Highly reliable systems are built with highly reliable components. On IBM POWER6

processor-based systems, this basic principle is expanded upon with a clear design for

reliability architecture and methodology. A concentrated, systematic, architecture-based

approach is designed to improve overall system reliability with each successive generation of

system offerings.

4.1.1 Designed for reliability

Systems designed with fewer components and interconnects have fewer opportunities to fail.

Simple design choices such as integrating two processor cores on a single POWER chip can

dramatically reduce the opportunity for system failures. In this case, a 16-core server will

include half as many processor chips (and chip socket interfaces) as with a

IBM Power 570 User Manual

Questions and Answers: