International Business Machines Corporation

Anthony P Vinski

Rick A Weckwerth

Brian L Bowles

Scott Alan Bauman

Harvey Gene Kiel

Thomas Edwin Murphy, Jr

Paul Francis Rieth

Kenneth Dale Aaker

Mark Arnold Boegel

A redundancy manager manages commands to peripheral devices in a computer system. These peripheral devices have multiple pathways connecting it to the computer system. The redundancy manager determines the number of independent pathways connected to the peripheral device, presents only one logical device to the operating system and any device driver and any other command or device processing logic in the command path before the redundancy manager. For each incoming command, the redundancy manager determines which pathways are properly functioning and selects the best pathway for the command based at least partly upon a penalty model where a path may be temporarily penalized by not including the pathway in the path selection process for a predetermined time. The redundancy manager further reroutes the command to an alternate path and resets the device for an alternate path that is not penalized or has otherwise failed.

Management of redundant physical data paths in a computing system

Provided are a method and system for replacing terminals, linked in a client server relationship with a central server, interacting with hardware specific programs within the central server, and wherein each terminal is identified by hardware specific programs within said central server via specific hardware attributes, and where the specific hardware attributes include at least a port identification and an I/O processor identification associated with the port identification. The method and system achieve the foregoing via the following. A processor is substituted for a selected terminal. Particular hardware attributes of the selected terminal are identified. The identified particular hardware attributes of the selected terminal are emulated using communications software. And, the processor is coupled to the central server via the communications software such that the processor interacts with hardware specific programs within the central server such that the substituted processor interacts with the hardware specific programs in a fashion indistinguishable from the selected terminal.

Method and system for replacing physical terminals interacting with

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Rochester, MN, United States of America

Anthony P Vinski