The cluster can monitor specific applications to detect failures. In the event of an application failure, the application can be restarted on the same or a different node of the cluster.
Studies show that application failures account for the greatest portion of downtime.
Detection and recovery of these types of failures minimizes this downtime and loss of productivity, especially when the application can be automatically recovered and reintegrated into the cluster. The high availability cluster uses sophisticated heartbeat mechanisms to determine when one of the servers in the cluster has failed. When a node failure is detected, the remaining server automatically restarts the highly available application and makes it available to the client, with no end-user disruption in most cases. Detection and recovery of common system failures keeps customers' business-critical applications up and running. The system administrator can selectively initiate the failover of a highly-available application from one node to the other.