“IBM is pushing to make hardware less susceptible to failure
through a variety of means, including the ability to change fans,
cards, power supplies and disk drives without shutting off the
system. In addition, the servers contain “chipkill” technology,
which lets the memory system keep on working even when a module
fails. Chipkill has also become cheaper because it no longer
requires special IBM memory…”
“To address software problems, IBM is adding “software
rejuvenation” features that accommodate problems with Windows 2000
and Windows NT. Those operating systems gradually become less
stable as computing tasks that are supposed to be finished don’t
quite let go of all the resources that they used, such as
memory. For that reason, many organizations periodically restart
their Windows machines.”
“In 2001, IBM plans to extend this software rejuvenation feature
to Novell operating systems. Linux is due for the same in
2002…”