Requirements and implementation of a highly configurable telecom power system for continuously available computing

Applications with even higher availability requirements than are normally required within the telecommunication industry exist today. With the continuing restructuring of the telecommunication network, and the integration of voice and data communications, these applications will be of great importance. This paper describes one of these applications, and how very high availability requirements are met by a means of system architecture, supervision, and maintenance/error handling routines. The design requirements and implementation of a fault tolerant power system for powering Stratus' "Continuously Available" computers are detailed. These computers are used in a wide variety of areas tolerating no down-time, such as telecommunication network management, emergency services, banking and finance, to mention a few. Continuous availability is achieved by using redundancy of hardware, fault tolerant error reporting and customer replaceable hardware.