IBM 8687 Installation Guide - Page 46
Software Rejuvenation, System Availability, Electronic Service Agent
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for RAID components and hard disk drives. This reduces labor and service costs by providing replacement part information in the alert message so that the correct part can be obtained for the service call. Software Rejuvenation - In networked servers, software often exhibits an increasing failure rate over time, due to programming errors, data corruption, numerical error accumulation, etc. These errors can spawn threads or processes that are never terminated, or they can result in memory leaks or file systems that fill up over time. These effects constitute a phenomenon known as "software aging", which can lead to unplanned server outages. Advanced IBM analytical techniques allow IBM Director Software Rejuvenation to monitor trends and predict system outages based on the experience of system outages on a given server. Alerts of this sort act as Predictive Failure Analysis for software, giving an administrator the opportunity to schedule servicing (rejuvenation) at a convenient time in advance of an actual failure and avoid costly downtime. Software Rejuvenation can be scheduled to reset all or part of the software system with no need for operator intervention. When Software Rejuvenation reinitializes a server, the server's software failure rate returns to its initial lower level because resources have been freed up and the cumulative effects of numerical errors have been removed. When Software Rejuvenation is invoked within a clustered environment, cluster management failover services (such as Microsoft Cluster Services and Microsoft Datacenter Server) may be used to stop the offending subsystem and restart it on the same or another node in the cluster in a controlled manner. In a clustered environment, xSeries servers can be set to fail over to another server, then be reset by IBM Director without downtime. IBM Director 3.1 includes a Trend Viewer feature to graphically monitor the software aging process and an "application culprit" list that identifies the applications most likely to be causing the aging. System Availability - System Availability accurately measures uptime/downtime for individual servers or groups of servers, and provides a variety of graphical views of this information. This enables users to track the improvements in their server availability in order to verify the benefits of the systems management processes and tools. IBM Director 3.1 includes the ability to distinguish between planned versus unplanned outages. Electronic Service Agent - Electronic Service Agent enables the Director server to contact IBM automatically in the event of a fault condition. Data gathered by IBM Director that is relevant to the fault is included in the message, in most cases allowing IBM service to respond to the condition without the need for additional details. Once IBM has been notified of the event, the course of action is the same as if a service call was placed manually. Electronic Service Agent support requires registering the systems 32 IBM ^ xSeries 440 Planning and Installation Guide