These requirements and recommendations relate to ease of use, ease of maintenance, manageability, and failure tolerance. Design guidelines that make server configuration, management, and servicing easier for end users and administrators are defined to help reduce the total cost of ownership for servers.
Reducing the total cost of ownership is an important goal for servers; a key priority in this effort for servers is minimizing downtime. This goal is achieved through mechanisms for backup and reliability, remote management, and emergency and preboot management.