Failover is a word used in IT circles to describe the capability of a system automatically switching over to a redundant or standby system in order to keep running smoothly when the initial system fails for some reason. If the first system goes down, the standby or redundant system will automatically kick in so there is no interruption. Having a failover solution in place is particularly critical for businesses that rely on their technology being continuously available or extremely reliable, such as servers that host websites.
If you need a server failover solution for your business, it can easily be had. These solutions are provided in many different forms and capacities by many different data protection centers and services. You could also do it yourself with hardware in your own building, but that is not always cost effective or plausible, especially if you are the owner of a business that is on the smaller side. Choosing to use a service provider instead means that the data protection center will both look after your data and look after the hardware necessary to provide the failover solutions to you.
There are some failover systems that do not work entirely automatically - they don't initiate failover on their own, but require manual approval from an actual person before initiating. If you want your system to have this type of “automated with manual approval” failover system, then be sure to look for a data protection center that offers this to you, as not all of them may do. If you do not need to approve the failover before it initiates, but still want a notification, there are many systems that can send a text message or other type of notification to a designated person if and when a failover kicks in.
Once the problem that made the initial system go down and the failover kick in is fixed, a process called failback will be performed. Failback is the process of restoring a system back to what it originally was doing before the failover kicked in. In other words, it returns the work to the original system and the standby or redundant system goes back to waiting until it is needed again.
Both failover and failback can be done with hardware or with virtualization. Virtual servers allow people to have multiple copies of a server (or different servers) on one piece of hardware. This is much less expensive than having to have multiple pieces of hardware available and it works just as well, so if you are looking to find a failover solution but don't have a lot of money to play with, look into a service that offers virtual solutions and you may find the prices reflect that.
The importance of having your IT infrastructure backed up and supported in the event of a disaster cannot be overstated. If your business needs its technology to constantly be available and rests heavily on being reliable, then a failover solution is one of the best courses to take.
Mark Woeppel is founder and president of Data-ProtectionOnline.com, which provides server failover, data protection software, sql server failover, exchange server failover, data protection center, data protection, continuous data protection, and data protection software.
