Our strategy is to develop the technical solutions that will allow IBM be the dominant platform provider in the emerging commercial internet and electronic commerce markets. This will require that IBM leverage emerging technologies to offer our customers a superior solution across a range of server platforms. These must span a wide range of availability options from general purpose to continuous computing (uninterrupted 24 hour by 7 days per week for 52 weeks per year of error free service, often called 24x7 service). Software environment and programming model consistency across all our platforms and with open system environments means that investments in the software infrastructure to improve software robustness and recovery characteristics for servers with hardware feature to enhance availability can also be fully exploited to improve software availability and operational characteristics while running on any of our product offerings. The long-term goal is to develop solutions which will complement the scale, performance range, and architectural focus of our base server product strategy, in single image SMP's (symmetric multi-processors), small clusters of single image SMP's and highly parallel clusters of SMP's.
Features which are key to achieving the above strategy for high availability are:
