Crash Only Software
Recovery Oriented Computing looks like the kind of of software I want. Wes notes: Crash-only software is an interesting idea; I once read that SGI developers, having complete faith in XFS recovery, would save time by simply hard-resetting machines instead of cleanly rebooting.
I should note that I once met a developer for IBM who was working on AIX's JFS filesystem (the analog of SGI's XFS) and he didn't seem to have the same confidence. We use XFS on this server.