Electrical computers and digital data processing systems: input/ – Intrasystem connection – Bus expansion or extension
Reexamination Certificate
2000-04-19
2004-03-23
Myers, Paul R. (Department: 2189)
Electrical computers and digital data processing systems: input/
Intrasystem connection
Bus expansion or extension
Reexamination Certificate
active
06711645
ABSTRACT:
PRIORITY CLAIM
This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/942,317, filed Oct. 1, 1997, now, U.S. Pat. No. 6,134,615, issued Oct. 17. 2000, which claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. § 119(e) of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/046,310, filed May 13, 1997 and entitled “High Performance Network Server System Management Interface,”.
APPENDIX A
Appendix A, which forms a part of this disclosure, is a list of commonly owned copending U.S. patent applications. Each one of the applications listed in Appendix A is hereby incorporated herein in its entirety by reference thereto.
COPYRIGHT RIGHTS
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to user interfaces for computer systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to implementing a graphical user interface (GUI) to allow for easy and efficient management and maintenance of peripheral devices in a computer network.
2. Description of the Related Technology
As enterprise-class servers, which are central computers in a network that manage common data, become more powerful and more capable, they are also becoming ever more sophisticated and complex. For many companies, these changes lead to concerns over server reliability and manageability, particularly in light of the increasingly critical role of server-based applications. While in the past many systems administrators were comfortable with all of the various components that made up a standards-based network server, today's generation of servers can appear as an incomprehensible, unmanageable black box. Without visibility into the underlying behavior of the system, the administrator must “fly blind.” Too often, the only indicators the network manager has on the relative health of a particular server is whether or not it is running.
It is well-acknowledged that there is a lack of reliability and availability of most standards-based servers. Server downtime, resulting either from hardware or software faults or from regular maintenance, continues to be a significant problem with significant costs. With emerging Internet, intranet and collaborative applications taking on more essential business roles every day, the cost of network server downtime will continue to spiral upward.
While hardware fault tolerance is an important element of an overall high availability architecture, it is only one piece of the puzzle. Studies show that a significant percentage of network server downtime is caused by transient faults in the I/O subsystem. These faults may be due, for example, to the device driver, the device firmware or hardware, which does not properly handle concurrent errors, and often causes servers to crash or hang. The result is hours of downtime per failure while a system administrator discovers the failure, takes some action and manually reboots the server. In many cases, data volumes on hard disk drives become corrupt and must be repaired when the volume is mounted. A dismount-and-mount cycle may result from the lack of “hot pluggability” or “hot plug” in current standards-based servers. Hot plug refers to the addition and swapping of peripheral adapters to an operational computer system. An adapter is simply any peripheral printed circuit board containing microchips, such as a PCI card, that may be removed from or added to a server peripheral device slot. Diagnosing intermittent errors can be a frustrating and time-consuming process. For a system to deliver consistently high availability, it should be resilient to these types of faults.
Existing systems also do not have an interface to control the changing or addition of an adapter. Since any user on a network could be using a particular adapter on the server, system administrators need a software application that controls the flow of communications to an adapter before, during, and after a hot plug operation on an adapter.
Current operating systems do not by themselves provide the support users need to hot add and swap an adapter. System users need software that will freeze and resume the communications of their adapters in a controlled fashion. The software needs to support the hot add of various peripheral adapters such as mass storage and network adapters. Additionally, the software should support adapters that are designed for various bus systems such as Peripheral Component Interconnect, CardBus, Microchannel, Industrial Standard Architecture (ISA), and Extended ISA (EISA). System users also need software to support the hot add and swap of adapters within canisters, which are detachable bus casings for a detachable bus system, and which also provide multiple slots for adapters.
In a typical PC-based server, upon the failure of an adapter, the system must be powered down, the new adapter and adapter driver installed, the server powered back up and the operating system reconfigured. However, various entities have tried to implement the hot plug of these adapters to a fault tolerant computer system. One significant difficulty in designing a hot plug system is protecting the circuitry contained on the adapter from being short-circuited when an adapter is added to a powered system. Typically, an adapter contains edge connectors which are located on one side of the printed circuit board. These edge connectors allow power to transfer from the system bus to the adapter, as well as supplying data paths between the bus and the adapter. These edge connectors fit into a slot on the bus on the computer system. A traditional hardware solution for “hot plug” systems includes increasing the length of at least one ground contact of the adapter, so that the ground contact on the edge connector is the first connector to contact the bus on insertion of the I/O adapter and the last connector to contact the bus on removal of the adapter. An example of such a solution is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,210,855 to Bartol.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,579,491 to Jeffries discloses an alternative solution to the hot installation of I/O adapters. Here, each hotly installable adapter is configured with a user actuable initiator to request the hot removal of an adapter. The I/O adapter is first physically connected to a bus on the computer system. Subsequent to such connection, a user toggles a switch on the I/O adapter which sends a signal to the bus controller. The signal indicates to the bus controller that the user has added an I/O adapter. The bus controller then alerts the user through a light emitting diode (LED) whether the adapter can be installed on the bus.
However, the invention disclosed in the Jeffries patent also contains several limitations. It requires the physical modification of the adapter to be hotly installed. Another limitation is that the Jeffries patent does not teach the hot addition of new adapter controllers or bus systems. Moreover, the Jeffries patent requires that before an I/O adapter is removed, another I/O adapter must either be free and spare or free and redundant. Therefore, if there was no free adapter, hot removal of an adapter is impossible until the user added another adapter to the computer system.
A related technology, not to be confused with hot plug systems, is Plug and Play defined by Microsoft® Corporation and PC product vendors. Plug and Play is an architecture that facilitates the integration of PC hardware adapters into systems. Plug and Play adapters are able to identify themselves to the computer system after the user installs the adapter on the bus. Plug and Play adapters are also able to identify the hardware resources that are needed for operation. Once this information is supplied to the operating system, the operating system can load the adapter drivers for the adapter that
Bright Kenny L.
Chari Srikumar N.
Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear LLP
Micro)n Technology, Inc.
Myers Paul R.
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