Patent ID: 6618819
Filing Date: 2003-09-09
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
A sparing method of accommodating equipment failures in a critical system comprising n pieces of equipment and at least one spare piece of equipment for said n pieces of equipment, comprising the steps of:(i) loading software onto each of said n pieces of equipment; (ii) commencing execution of said loaded software with said respective piece of equipment; (iii) transferring an image of information on each of said n pieces of equipment to a memory on said at least one spare piece of equipment when commencing the execution, said information including said loaded software and a hardware state; (iv) detecting a failure of one of said n pieces of equipment; (v) causing said at least one spare piece of equipment to replace said detected one piece of equipment by commencing execution of said image corresponding to said detected one piece of equipment, which is stored in the memory, to employ said at least one spare piece of equipment in place of said detected one piece of equipment.