Because this switchover is transparent to clients, a system failure does not impact users' productivity. Applications are migrated and connectivity is transferred in such a way that clients have continuous access to applications and data. Scalability at the application level is also suported. When the solutuion is configured with multi-directional failover, applications that are running on one machine can be broken up and failed over to separate machines. In a shared-storage environment, data storage is separate from the servers in the cluster.
All data is stored on a shared disk array.
This independence allows data to be accessed regardless of which server is being used to host the application. Additionally, the shared storage locking mechanism helps maintain data integrity by locking the drive so that only one application can access specified data at one time. N-Way failover provides failover of an application across more than two systems. This feature ensures that as long as one server in the cluster remains active, an application will be available, no matter what the sequence of failures that occurs. This feature allows the additional load of the failed primary server to be distributed across multiple backup servers, rather than burdening a single backup server with the full additional load.