Sun Microsystems Fire X4540, Administration Manual

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74 Sun Fire X4500/ X4540 Servers Administration Guide • October 2008
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. Together, reliability, availability, and serviceability features
provide for near continuous system operation.
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.
To deliver high levels of reliability, availability and serviceability, the Sun Fire X4540
Server system offers the following features:
■
Hot-pluggable disk drives
■
Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies
■
Environmental monitoring and fault protection
■
Integrated Lights Out Management (ILOM), Sun’s remote management capability
■
Support for disk and network multipathing with automatic failover capability
■
Error correction and parity checking for improved data integrity
■
Easy access to all internal replaceable components
■
Full in-rack serviceability by extending the slides
Hot-Pluggable and Hot-Swappable Components
Sun Fire X4540 Server hardware is designed to support hot-pluggable and
hot-swappable components. Hot-plugging and hot-swapping are cost-effective
solutions that provides increased system availability and continuous serviceability
for business-critical computing environments, by providing the ability to:
■
Remove or replace a failed or failing component while the system is operating
without service disruption.
■
Increase storage capacity dynamically to handle larger work loads and improve
system performance.