Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability on PowerMax 2500 and 8500 Arrays > Overview
Today’s mission-critical environments demand more than redundancy. They require non-disruptive operations, non-disruptive upgrades, and being “always online.” They require high-end performance - handling all workloads, predictable or not, under all conditions. They require the added protection of increased data availability provided by local snapshot replication and continuous remote replication.
Reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features are crucial for enterprise environments that require always-on availability. PowerMax arrays are architected for six-nines (99.9999%) availability. The many redundant features discussed in this document are factored into the calculation of overall system availability. This includes redundancy in the back end, cache memory, front-end, and fabric, as well as the types of RAID protections given to volumes on the back end. Calculations may also include time to replace failed or failing FRUs (field replaceable units). In turn, this also considers customer service levels, replacement rates of the various FRUs, and hot sparing capability for drives.