Moving forward, Sun wants to understand what caused these faults, and build corrective procedures into the kernel. Achieving mainframe-level predictability through preemptive and proactive operations is the primary goal, says Andy Ingram, Sun's director of marketing for enterprise server products. Dan Woods, VP and chief technical officer, says the decision was based on availability concerns. When the commerce system was down, we'd lose customers. In April, IBM added the Dynamic Loadable Kernel to AIX to make the system behave more like a mainframe for seamless availability.
Customers can install drives while the system is running or back up data without shutting down.
Miles Barel, IBM's program director for AIX marketing, says the Internet demands such levels of availability. The Continental Cluster program will extend the program to provide failover to servers located anywhere in the world, using dedicated lines.