IBM AIX Continuous Availability Features - IBM Redbooks

1.1 Overview
In May 2007, IBM introduced the newest Power Architecture® technology-based line of
servers incorporating the inventive IBM POWER6 processor technology to deliver both
outstanding performance and enhanced reliability, availability, and serviceability capabilities.
This new line of servers enhances the IBM POWER5 processor-based server family, with
new capabilities designed to help ease administrative burdens and increase system
utilization.
In addition, IBM virtualization technologies 1 , available in the IBM System p and System i
product families, enable individual servers to run dozens or even hundreds of mission-critical
applications.
Today's enterprises can no longer afford planned or unplanned system outages. Even a few
minutes of application downtime can result in financial losses, eroded customer confidence,
damage to brand image, and public relations problems.
To better control and manage their IT infrastructure, enterprises have concentrated their IT
operations in large (and on demand) data centers. These data centers must be resilient
enough to handle the ups and downs of the global market, and must manage changes and
threats with consistent availability, security and privacy, both around the clock and around the
world. Most of the solutions are based on an integration of operating system clustering
software, storage, and networking.
How a system, server or environment handles failures is characterized as its reliability,
availability and serviceability. In today's world of e-business, the reliability, availability and
serviceability of an operating system and the hardware on which it executes have assumed
great importance.
Today's businesses require that IT systems be self-detecting, self-healing, and support 7x24x
365 operations. More and more IT systems are adopting fault tolerance through techniques
such as redundancy and error correction, to achieve a high level of reliability, availability, and
serviceability.
The reliability, availability and serviceability characteristics will be a significant market
differentiator in the UNIX server space. This has resulted in UNIX servers attaining the
reliability, availability and serviceability levels that were once considered to be available only
on the mainframe systems.
More and more IT systems are adopting fault tolerance through redundancy, memory failure
detection and correction methods, to achieve a high level of reliability, availability and
serviceability.
The following sections discuss the concepts of continuous availability features in more detail.
1.2 Business continuity
The terms business continuity and disaster recovery are sometimes used interchangeably (as
are business resumption and contingency planning). The following sections explain the
definitions used in this paper.
1
Virtualization features available for IBM System p and System i servers may depend on the type of hardware
used, and may be subject to separate licensing.
2 IBM AIX Continuous Availability Features