Durable memory RS/6000 system design

The DM/6000 prototype is a fault-tolerant/durable-memory RS/6000. The main storage of this system is battery backed so as to maintain memory content across prolonged power interruptions. In addition, there are no single points of failure, and all likely multiple failure scenarios are covered. The prototype is intended to match the data integrity and availability characteristics of RAID5 disks. Redundancy is managed in hardware and in transparent to the software; application programs and the operating system (AIX) can run unmodified. The prototype is based on the IBM PowerPC 601 microprocessor operating at 80 MHz and is equivalent in performance and software appearance to a conventional 4-way shared bus, cache coherent, symmetric multiprocessor (SMP), with 4 gigabytes of non-volatile main storage.<<ETX>>