Flexible I/O improves flexibility and reliability of mission-critical IA server PRIMEQUEST

The PRIMEQUEST mission-critical IA servers consist of a system board, which mounts the CPU and memory, and an I/O unit (IOU), which mounts I/O-related blocks such as hard disk drives and PCl slots. The system boards and IOUs are physically separate from each other and are interconnected by a crossbar. This feature is referred to as the Flexible I/O because it enables partitions to be configured from system boards and IOUs in any combination. This paper gives an overview of the Flexible I/O and discusses some of the benefits it provides.