Reliability; Serviceability - Dell PowerConnect B-DCX-4S Backbone Hardware Reference Manual

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The high-availability software architecture of the PowerConnect B-DCX-4S provides a common
framework for all applications that reside on the system, allowing global and local states to be
maintained through any component failure. High-availability elements consist of the High
Availability Manager, the heartbeat, the fault/health framework, the replicated database,
initialization, and software upgrade.
The High Availability Manager controls access to the standby control processor, facilitates software
upgrades, prevents extraneous switchover activity, closes and flushes streams, provides flow
control and message buffering, and supports a centralized active and standby state.

Reliability

The PowerConnect B-DCX-4S uses the following error detection and correction mechanisms to
ensure reliability of data:
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Serviceability

The PowerConnect B-DCX-4S provides the following features to enhance and ensure serviceability:
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PowerConnect B-DCX-4S Backbone Hardware Reference Manual
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Hot-swappable World Wide Name (WWN) cards.
Error Detection and Correction mechanism, which checks for encoder errors and fault isolation
(EDFI), such as cyclic redundancy checking (CRC), parity checking, checksum, and illegal
address checking.
Power-on self-test (POST).
Dual control processors that enable hot, nondisruptive fast firmware upgrades.
One serial port and two Ethernet ports (on each control processor) for management and for
service. Offline control processor diagnostics and remote diagnostics simplify troubleshooting.
The standby control processor monitors diagnostics to ensure it is operational, should a
failover be necessary.
Bus monitoring and control of blades and other field-replaceable units (FRUs).
Modular design with hot-swappable components.
Flash memory that stores two firmware images per control processor.
USB port on control processor blades for all tasks that formerly required an FTP/SCP server,
including software and firmware upgrades.
Redesigned cable management using vertical fingers to accommodate the horizontal
orientation of the blades.
Nonvolatile random-access memory (NVRAM), containing the OEM serial number, Brocade
serial number, revision information, and part number information.
Background health-check daemon.
Memory scrubber, self test, and bus ping to determine if a bus is not functioning.
RASlog messages.
SMI-S compliant.
Watchdog timers.
Status LEDs.
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Reliability

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