Collectively, these further enhance the total availability of the overall environment. Installed on a pair of NetApp filers, NetApp Clustered Failover ensures data availability by transferring the data service of an unavailable filer to another filer in the cluster. Often, the transfer of data service is transparent to end users and applications, and the data service is quickly resumed with no visible interruption to business operation. Automatic and Manual Failover to Minimize Downtime NetApp Clustered Failover constantly monitors the health of the cluster filers. If it detects a catastrophic hardware failure on a filer, it automatically initiates a failover operation to transfer the data service to its partner filer.
Data integrity is ensured during the transfer.
Once the failover operation completes, the takeover filer will immediately resume data service for the failed filer. The data service of the takeover filer is never impacted and is fully available during the entire failover operation. The takeover filer maintains this dual data-serving mode until an administrator initiates action to restore data service back to its original state. The entire failover process is automatic, with no manual intervention required at any point. Administrators most often take advantage of NetApp Clustered Failover to provide continuous data service during scheduled filer maintenance and upgrade by manually initiating a failover operation.