noun Technical meaning of failover (systems) Automatically switching to a different, redundant system upon failure or abnormal termination of the currently active system. Failover can be applied to a cluster of servers, to network or storage components or any other set of redundant devices that must provide high availability because down-time would be expensive or inconvenient. It may be implemented in hardware, software or a combination. A "hot standby" is continuously active at the same time as the failed system, using some kind of load balancing to share the work, whereas a "warm standby" is ready to become active at short notice. When the failed system is operational again it may "failback", i.e. become (one of) the active system(s) or it may become a warm standby. 1
noun failover A method of protecting computer systems from failure, in which standby equipment automatically takes over when the main system fails. 1
noun failover (Countable Noun) (computing) 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. 0
