By effectively planning hardware maintenance and upgrades, you can greatly reduce and even eliminate the impact of these activities to availability of your server.
There are times when you need to perform routine maintenance on your hardware or increase the capacity of your hardware. These operations can be disruptive to your business.
If you are performing a system upgrade, be sure that you do careful planning before you begin. The more carefully you plan for your new server, the faster the upgrade will go. For more details on the planning process, see Upgrades.
Concurrent maintenance
Many hardware components on the iSeries system can be replaced, added, or removed concurrently while the system is operating. For example, the ability to "hot plug" is supported for PCI card slots, disk slots, and redundant fans and power supplies. Concurent maintenance improves the availability of the system and allows you to perform certain upgrades, maintenance, or repairs without impacting the users of the system.
For details on concurrent maintenance, see Concurrent maintenance.
Capacity on Demand
With IBM® eServer™ Capacity on Demand, you can activate additional processors and pay only for the new processing power as your needs grow. You can increase your processing capacity without disrupting any of your current operations.
Capacity on Demand is a feature that offers the capability to nondisruptively activate one or more central processors of your server. Capacity on Demand adds capacity in increments of one processor, up to the maximum number of stand-by processors built into your model. Capacity on Demand has significant value for installations where you want to upgrade without disruption.
For more information on this feature, see Capacity on Demand.