You want to explain something technical to a manager and expect him to understand? Good luck with this! If he would be able to understand something technical he would be administrator, not manager, no?

Having said this: a POWER system is a lot more complex than the PC-crap Windoze-people use to clutter up datacenters with. Understand that the following is stretching the truth a bit to accomodate the PC-jargon. It is probably as close to the truth as your manager is going to understand it anyway, so perhaps no harm is done:

There is something remotely analogous to a BIOS, but it is controlled from the HMC mostly. The system is connected to the outside (this means primarily: the HMC) via one or two so-called "Service Processor"s, which - in functionality - are similar to the "ILO-boards" of rack-mounted PC-servers. These service processors have a web interface (in fact they have little specialized web servers built in as firmware), which is called ASMI. You can access the ASMI directly on a new system by connecting a network device to the service processor board, configuring your interface into the same address range as the default addresses of the interfaces (consult this page for details) or you can access it via the HMC once the system is connected to one.[/QUOTE]

This i can wholeheartedly concur to. If a system goes down there is usually a reason for this and there should be an administrator present to assess which this reason was and if it is safe to bring the system back online again. Whatever the reason for going down was it usually doesn't go away with the reboot so bouncing back online is a potentially hazardous proposition. Automatically starting a system after a forced down might initiate a case of "system ping-pong" which may be even more destructive than the initial outage.

I strongly advise against rebooting systems automatically and to my knowledge it is nowhere done in professional shops.

I hope this helps.

bakunin