High Availability and Disaster Recovery Glossary of Terms
Marathon Technologies is dedicated to helping businesses ensure that their computing resources are always available and operating properly. To help you navigate the Marathon Technologies website, we've put together a list of common terms you'll come across throughout the site. Use this glossary to help you understand the world of high availability and disaster recovery better.
Application availability: This is when applications can continuosly run, even without an IT staff on-site. With application availability, businesses will not experience any downtime.
Disaster recovery: This is the process or procedure related to preparing for the continuation of computing resources after a disaster or failure. You'll also see this referred to as "DR" on our website.
Failover: The ability to automatically switch over to a redundant or standby server, system or network upon failure of a critical application, server, system or network.
Fault tolerance: Commonly referred to as FT on our website, fault tolerance is the ability of a computing system or component to continue normal operation even with hardware or software failures.
High availability: Refers to a system or component that is continuously operational. When a high availability solution is implemented, computing systems can continue to perform the tasks they were designed to perform with minimal downtime. You'll also see this referred to as "HA" on our website.
High availability cluster: The availability of critical applications which are organized in groups of resources. Rather than failing over full servers at once, high availability clustering automatically fails over these clusters of resources to provide high availability in groups.
Server redundancy: Having a secondary computer system or network device that will take over when the primary server fails.