Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), also known as reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM), is a computer hardware engineering term involving reliability engineering, high availability, and serviceability design. The phrase was originally used by IBM as a term to describe the robustness of their mainframe computers. Computers designed with higher levels of RAS have many features that protect data integrity and help them stay available for long periods of time without failure. This data integrity and uptime is a particular selling point for mainframes and fault-tolerant systems.

Definitions

While RAS originated as a hardware-oriented term, systems thinking has extended the concept of reliability-availability-serviceability to systems in general, including software: Note the distinction between reliability and availability: reliability measures the ability of a system to function correctly, including avoiding data corruption, whereas availability measures how often the system is available for use, even though it may not be functioning correctly. For example, a server may run forever and so have ideal availability, but may be unreliable, with frequent data corruption.

Failure types

Physical faults can be temporary or permanent:

Failure responses

Transient and intermittent faults can typically be handled by detection and correction by e.g., ECC codes or instruction replay (see below). Permanent faults will lead to uncorrectable errors which can be handled by replacement by duplicate hardware, e.g., processor sparing, or by the passing of the uncorrectable error to high level recovery mechanisms. A successfully corrected intermittent fault can also be reported to the operating system (OS) to provide information for predictive failure analysis.

Hardware features

Example hardware features for improving RAS include the following, listed by subsystem: Fault-tolerant designs extended the idea by making RAS to be the defining feature of their computers for applications like stock market exchanges or air traffic control, where system crashes would be catastrophic. Fault-tolerant computers (e.g., see Tandem Computers and Stratus Technologies), which tend to have duplicate components running in lock-step for reliability, have become less popular, due to their high cost. High availability systems, using distributed computing techniques like computer clusters, are often used as cheaper alternatives.