Providing High Availability
Ensuring that your Unix system provides high availability requires that you first understand what a highly available service is. Many people confuse high availability with fault tolerance, but the two terms mean very different things. Fault tolerance strives for 100% availability with no interruptions in service; the goal of high availability, on the other hand, is minimal interruption in service.
Fault-tolerant systems are able to recover gracefully from an unexpected hardware or software failure. A server with a UPS is a simple example of a fault-tolerant power subsystem, as it can withstand a power failure without any ill effects.
Highly available systems, on the other hand, are able to recover gracefully from certain ...
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