Redundancy

The system must be redundant. Minor failures should not last longer than 1 hour. It must be possible to recover from major failures in less than 24 hours with a minimum of intervention. Due to the geographical locality of the institute and the lack of funds for an expensive maintenance contract the backup solution must be maintained in house and always be available.

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A SECOND CONTROL COMPUTER (REFERRED TO AS THE ``BACKUP'' CONTROL COMPUTER) WHICH WILL BE DEDICATED TO SERVE AS A BACKUP IN THE CASE OF FAILURE OF THE MAIN CONTROL COMPUTER AND WHICH CAN BE USED FOR TEST PURPOSES MUST BE BOUGHT

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SPARES MUST BE BOUGHT AND KEPT AVAILABLE FOR ALL CRITICAL SUBSYSTEMS OF THE NCCS (e.g. PC-STEER)

The backup computer must be have an identical motherboard and CPU as the main computer and must have identical versions of the main interface cards (to be defined). It must be possible to shutdown the main computer and boot up the backup computer running identical versions of the software. The backup computer must be reserved for this purpose. During tests of new versions of the software (operating system, field system etc.) it must be possible to use the backup computer for testing. The same is true for all backed up critical sub-systems.