HP ProLiant 3000 The Benefits of PCI Hot Plug Technology - Page 6

The Benefits of PCI Hot Plug Technology 6 Compaq's PCI Hot Plug Implementation Advantages Compaq's PCI Hot Plug implementation has multiple benefits including improved availability, an industry-standard approach, customer investment protection, efficient manageability and serviceability, and enhanced and future generation solutions. Highest Level of I/O Availability PCI Hot Plug technology represents a significant advance in fault-tolerant systems. PCI Hot Plug technology provides for three major capabilities: hot replacement, hot upgrade, and hot expansion. • Hot replacement is the process of removing a failed or failing PCI adapter and inserting an identical adapter into the same slot while the server is operating. • Hot upgrade is the process of upgrading an existing adapter or the adapter's device driver while the server is operating. This allows the customer to reconfigure an adapter without bringing the system down. • Hot expansion is the process of installing an additional adapter into a previously empty slot while the server is operating. Redundant NIC and PCI Hot Plug To provide an even greater improved availability benefit, PCI Hot Plug technology can be combined with redundant controller configurations, such as Compaq Redundant Netelligent NIC technology. Compaq Redundant Netelligent NIC technology allows two similar NICs to share a single instance of device driver code. One NIC becomes the active network controller, and the other NIC acts as a standby controller. If the active NIC fails, as shown in Figure 4, the network traffic can be switched automatically to the standby NIC. With PCI Hot Plug, the failed NIC can be replaced without shutting down the system. Thus, the end user can have continuous service and the administrator can eliminate both planned and unplanned downtime. Figure 4. Recovering from a network controller failure using PCI Hot Plug technology and Compaq Redundant Netelligent NICs. ECG093/0798