A funny thing happened the other day when I went to one of my favorite sites to look up a word...I saw the above message, but looking at the redirect URL, it says "failover-namechangedtoprotecttheinnocent.com". Now, far be it from me to be correcting the vocabulary of a site whose stock in trade is word definitions, but in the high availability biz, that is NOT what we mean by "failover". A failover is when you have a service under HA cluster control, and in the event of a failure, that service is relocated to another server in the cluster. In its entirety.
Clearly there was some attempt made at protecting the service, otherwise my browser would have just thrown an error saying the site wasn't available. But it's just as clear that protection wasn't extended to the entire business service. We introduced Virtual Business Services to Veritas Cluster Server and ApplicationHA last December in our 6.0 release. This allows our customers to link together all the various components of a multi-tier application stack and make the entire service highly resilient and recoverable, even if the individual components of the application stack are spread across multiple OS and hypervisor platforms. You can learn more about Virtual Business Services by watching this short video.
Now, I don't want to beat on these guys. They provide a great service and I use it all the time, and the service was back online not long after I saw this message. And it's not like they're my bank or something like that. But...still.
If you're going to do HA, use Veritas Cluster Server and do it like you mean it. Don't be that guy.
