System events, that may be an indication of possible future system problems can be detected. Manual or automatic actions can be taken to prevent unexpected outages. They can be used to determine the state of nodes or networks and provide notification of process failures. These innovative system features provide vital information about the SP system and application behavior. Scripts can be tailored for unique customer application environment.
Scripts can allow the automatic initiation of actions when specific situations surface.
Additional predictive and preventive functions are provided with the SP system and are planned to be expanded and enhanced in future releases. PFA is described in detail in the section on disks mirroring later in this paper. The usefulness of each depends on the specific system configuration and application environment a customer has chosen to implement. The entire system remains operational and repairs can be deferred to a later time or, in some cases, can be made concurrent with normal system operation. It is critical that customers carefully select the appropriate optional HA features to ensure the SP system will have the desired availability characteristics.