From this inventory, MIS staff can establish a foundation on which to build their high-availability solution. At its simplest, dual paths are needed everywhere. Since the intranet is critical to all of your applications, you need to build duplicate paths to get to it. By this we mean adding a second LAN card to the system and creating a duplicate path. This takes about two seconds on FDDI networks and five seconds on ethernet networks.
Network connections remain intact.
Despite the LAN card failure, users' access to mission-critical information over an intranet is seamless and transparent. Should all LAN cards or the system fail, a new level of high-availability solution is required. Through the implementation of clusters, the intranet provides the necessary link to allow software to identify a healthy node and move the application. This causes a brief user outage but the application is restored. A healthy node may be across the room, across the city or across the continent.