Chapter 1 System Overview 15
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 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. Together,
reliability, availability, and serviceability features provide for near continuous
system operation.
To deliver high levels of reliability, availability, and serviceability, the Sun Fire V890
system offers the following features:
■ Hot-pluggable disk drives and PCI cards
■ N+1 power supply redundancy
■ Hot-swappable power supplies
■ Redundant, hot-swappable fan trays
■ Environmental monitoring and fault protection
■ Automatic system recovery (ASR) capabilities
■ Hardware watchdog mechanism
■ Remote System Control (RSC) remote “lights out” management capability
■ Support for disk and network multipathing with automatic failover capability
■ Dual-loop enabled FC-AL mass storage subsystem
■ Support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 1+0, and 5 storage configurations
■ Error correction and parity checking for improved data integrity
■ Easy access to all internal replaceable components
■ Easily accessible LED status indicators
■ Four different levels of system diagnostics