failover

See also: fail over

English

Etymology

From fail +‎ over.

Pronunciation

• Audio (UK):

  (file)

Noun

failover (countable and uncountable, plural failovers)

1. (computing, countable) An automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system, such as a means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel backup system which is kept running at all times, so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup.
   • 2004, Gregory Nyberg, Robert Patrick, Paul Bauerschmidt, Mastering BEA WebLogic Server: Best Practices for Building and ..., page 638:

     Horizontal scaling gives you some failover and flexibility that you normally cannot get with only vertical scaling.

   • 2005, Proceedings, IEEE Computer Society, page 338:

     while Tungsten is not heavily redundant as these systems, the ability of Lustre to support some failover can be leveraged to eliminate single points of failure.

   • 2007 July 11, “Business continuity for SMEs”, in Computer Weekly:

     you have to make sure you can access it or ensure it can provide some failover," says Tarzey.

See also

• failback
• fail over
• hot spare