Stephen Shankland writes in CNET News.com . . .

“Motorola said today it will come out in May with Linux servers for telecommunications that will be guaranteed to stay up 99.999 percent of the time–all but five minutes of the year. This level of availability is possible because CPUs, fans, power supplies and cards will be plugged into PCI slots. Computer center managers, therefore, will be able to remove and add them without having to shut the computer down, Motorola said.”

“Swapping CPUs while a system is running is notoriously tricky and a major improvement for Linux. To accomplish the task, Motorola has created its own add-in card that negotiates the technical issues in a “hot-swap,” as the process is known, said David Peters, director of strategic alliances at the Motorola computing group. Motorola currently makes a series of more standard server appliances but generally makes them on behalf of other companies, which market them under their own name.”

“Telecommunications companies, disdainful of computers that crash, would be a powerful new segment of customers for Linux . . .”

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