Compaq ProLiant 7000 PCI Hot Plug Technology - Page 7

ECG080/0698 TECHNOLOGY BRIEF (cont.) ... 4. The administrator uses the PCI Hot Plug Button or the software user interface to notify the OS that power can be applied to the slot. The green LED flashes while the OS performs the power state change. 5. The OS turns on power to the slot and either automatically locates and loads the appropriate device driver or prompts the administrator to locate and load the driver. Adapters and Device Drivers Most industry-standard PCI adapters can be used without any modifications. For industrystandard PCI adapters to have hot-plug functionality, however, new features must be added to the device drivers. Leading IHVs committed to modifying their device drivers to be hot-plug aware include 3Com, Adaptec, Dialogic, Digi International, Mylex, QLogic, AMI, Madge, SMC, and SysKonnect. The standardization work with the PCI SIG has encouraged the proliferation of hot-plug aware drivers for third-party devices. In addition, Compaq has developed hot-plug capable drivers for its own leading PCI server adapters. Compatibility Issues PCI Hot Plug technology addresses compatibility concerns by using standard PCI adapters. A hot-plug system requires a hot-plug platform, a hot-plug OS, and hot-plug adapter drivers. A system can include any combination of hot-plug and conventional versions of each of these components, including a mix of both hot-plug and conventional adapter drivers. However, a particular adapter can be hot-plugged only if all three components for that adapter support hotplug operation. A hot-plug platform supports loading a conventional OS. The system behaves as a conventional system if no hot-plug software is loaded. Hot-plug OSs are designed to load and execute on any platform. If no hot-plug controller is found on the platform, then the OS will not permit the user to perform any hot-plug operations at the user interface. Hot-plug OSs generally require driver modifications to support full hot-plug capability. However, as with any driver revision, the OS will often support previous generations of drivers. Furthermore, in some cases, the new driver can be loaded onto the previous version of the OS. If a conventional driver is loaded onto a hot-plug OS, or vice versa, the driver will continue to have the same capability it always had in the conventional application. However, the adapter cannot be hot-plugged unless both the driver and the OS support the hot-plug operation. CONCLUSION With the introduction of PCI Hot Plug technology, Compaq once again set the standard in highavailability and fault-tolerant solutions for the enterprise. PCI Hot Plug offers unprecedented server availability by allowing users to replace, upgrade, and add PCI adapters to the PCI local bus without powering down the server. With the release of the ProLiant 6500 and ProLiant 7000, Compaq made the chassis and electronics design changes required for safe and efficient removal and insertion of PCI adapters without powering down the server. Next-generation PCI Hot Plug features are included in Compaq's newest enterprise server, the Pentium II Xeon Model of the ProLiant 7000, released in June 1998. PCI Hot Plug technology brings significant advances to the other high-availability solutions Compaq currently offers. By bringing this technology to the market as an open, industry standard, Compaq continues to strengthen its position as a leader in enterprise computing. 7