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What's the difference between failover and disaster recovery?
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Failover is the ability to switch automatically and seamlessly to a reliable backup system. When a component or primary system fails, either a standby operational mode or redundancy should achieve failover and lessen or eliminate negative impact on users.
Failover is defined as a secondary system where standby computers automatically take over if the main one stops working. An example of failover is a backup computer taking over saving a file if the main computer suddenly breaks down.
What is failover? Failover is the process of switching to a redundant or standby computer server, system, hardware component or network. Other terms also used to describe this capability include role-swap or switching.
Redundant : using two computers when one would be sufficient. The redundant server is there in case the other computer fails. Failover : the automatic transfer of workload from a failed computer to another computer.
Failover: When one machine fails, another machine (usually in the same location) takes over and resumes service
Disaster recovery: When Godzilla destroys your data center, you do have alternative locations to keep providing your service and protocols/means for the other location to know how to keep delivering the service
Depending on the particular needs of each service, disaster recovery might just be a backup tape in a safe in a different location. In other words, it's just having a defined protocol to recover from disaster. Likewise, failover might just be having a spare backup machine which makes you go to the data center for it to take over the place of the failed one, that is, having a defined protocol about what to do in case of machine failure.
Summing up, failover answers the question 'what do I do in case a single machine fails?', disaster recovery answers 'what do I do in case a disaster happens (fire, floods, war, ISP goes bankrupt, whatever)?'
High Availability Deployment Architecture
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