Beyond BIOS

Chapter 17 – Manageability

I came, I saw, I conquered

—Julius Caesar

RAS is a critical requirement for enterprise class servers, which includes high availability server platforms. System uptime is measured against the goal of “five nines,” which represents 99.999 percent availability. One of the key aims of manageability software is to help achieve this goal, by implementing functions like dynamic error detection, correction, hardware failure prediction, and the taking of corrective actions like replacing or turning off failing components before the failure actually happens. In addition, other noncritical manageability functions enable IT personal to remotely manage a system by performing such operations as remote power up/ down, diagnostics, ...