HP ProLiant 3000 The Benefits of PCI Hot Plug Technology - Page 1

White Paper July 1998 ECG093/0798 Prepared by ECG Product Marketing Group Compaq Computer Corporation Contents Overview 3 Cost of Downtime 3 Compaq's PCI Hot Plug Strategy 5 Compaq's PCI Hot Plug Implementation Advantages ......6 Highest Level of I/O Availability 6 PCI Hot Plug - an IndustryStandard Approach 7 Investment Protection 8 Efficient Manageability and Serviceability 9 Enhanced Solutions 9 Conclusion 10 For More Information 10 The Benefits of PCI Hot Plug Technology This white paper summarizes Compaq PCI Hot Plug technology strategy, discusses Compaq's leadership role in the development of the industry standard, and explains the benefits of Compaq's implementation of the PCI Hot Plug standard to help organizations maximize productivity by decreasing server downtime. Abstract: As an increasing number of companies migrate their business-critical applications to industry-standard servers, the need for redundant features and hot-pluggable components to minimize system downtime is increasing. Each downtime event affects more people at ever-increasing costs. The need has grown beyond "high availability" toward "approaching continuous availability". Continuous availability requires the elimination not only of unplanned downtime but a reduction of planned downtime as well. Compaq Computer Corporation, the world's leading server provider, has historically taken a leadership role in the development of such industry-standard technologies that are approaching continuous system availability. With the development of PCI Hot Plug technology, an industry standard, Compaq strengthens its role in providing the highest levels of I/O availability solutions for the distributed 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. PCI Hot Plug technology benefits also include customer investment protection and efficient manageability and serviceability. In addition, 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 solutions are included in Compaq's newest enterprise server, the Pentium II Xeon Model of the ProLiant 7000, released in June 1998.