What is Failover?
Avoid Costly Downtime with Failover Software
Failover is defined as the process of switching over to a secondary or redundant server, system or network when a failure occurs in the operations of the primary server, system or network. Failover software is utilized in systems that cannot afford any downtime or delays. These mission critical systems, which rely on redundancy to maintain a level of high availability, utilize failover as a critical part of their fault tolerance protection.
Failover software protects against interruptions in availability, due to either planned maintenance or unexpected system or network failures. To protect against this interruption in availability, failover systems utilize a primary device, such as a server or router, as well as a secondary device.
When an interruption occurs in the primary device, failover automatically switches its functions to the secondary device. This secondary device takes over the operating functions as soon as the interruption or the failure is detected; the secondary device is then instructed to re-master any system wide resources, recover failed transactions, and basically restore the system to normal.
Failover is designed to take place transparently, which means that the entire process happens without any noticeable effects being seen by the user. The transition happens seamlessly and within milliseconds of the fault or interruption. Because of this transparency, no human intervention is required and the process happens automatically. However, some systems are designed so that only partial failover occurs transparently. These systems require the intervention of human interaction to approve the procedure before the entire failover can occur.