There was an article - I believe in the Wall Street Journal - about these patents being rejected within the last week. The USPTO only does a very minimal prior art search during the initial application process because there is just too much data to dig through in order to complete an exhaustive search for prior art. Once the patent is issued, if a patent disput arises, then normally the two sides of the dispute will provide additional information to the USPTO that supports their side of the argument. In this instance, RIM was able to find prior art in Europe that pre-dated NTP's patent applications by a year, or so. This prior art was the basis for the non-final rejections that have been recently returned by the USPTO.

Well, yes and no. You can configure the LPAR to be entirely segregated from a hardware standpoint. However, for the best rate of consolidation, you'd need to use VIO servers (virtual I/O) for the sharing of disk (at an Logical Volume level) and the sharing of Ethernet cards (since you can't split the 2 port cards over 2 LPARs). In that case, the "loss" of the VIO server would impact any client LPARS.

Which is why a lot of people create two VIO servers, to provide redundancy across two seperate LPARS. That way, if you lose one VIO server, your client LPARs are not necessarily down.

The VIO servers are basically "appliance LPARs" in any case. They have no other roles except to provide "I/O Servers" to client LPARs.