fail over

[Dave Wilton]

"Failover" is hardly new. It's been a staple of high-tech jargon for years.
It is not synonymous with backup. A "failover" is when other machines are
set to take on the tasks of another that has failed. It's analogous with
overdraft protection on your checking account, where money is automatically
taken out of your savings account to cover the checks you write, only it's
computing resources, not money.

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Victor Steinbok
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 7:22 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: fail over

I thought I had sent a message on this last week, but, apparently, I did
not include correct address.

Below, discussion of "fail over" as a new term, question about
figurative usage of "radio silence" and antedating of "mission-critical"
(1976-->1968-->?) [emphasis added in quotations throughout]

 From a message on ABA eDiscovery committee:

> There appears to be an interesting eDiscovery/preservation issue that
>  stands apart from the business-needs modeling (high availability,
> *failover*, service level guarantees) discussed by this linked
> article.
>
> What do I mean?  That term *"failover"* may likely be synonymous
> with...backup. So, where there is discoverable, relevant, ESI in the
>  cloud, there is also backup or, some degree and form of replicated
> data sets seeding the same, or other clouds.

I initially interpreted that as a noun. I appear to have been
mistaken--it's both noun and verb. Here's the text from the original CRN
slide:

http://fwd4.me/00lM
Slide 3
> "It will force customers to ask more questions, put a disaster
> recovery plan in place that includes more than one provider for
> example, or *fail over* into another region. Service providers are in
> a tough spot now to do what they should have been doing since the
> beginning, and that's educating their customers with all the options
>  available to them."
Slide 4
> "The exposure here is that when leveraging the cloud, the buyer needs
>  to fully understand the technology and the SLAs that each cloud
> provider offers. High availability and data center *failover* are
> offered at different levels. Clients need to fully understand what
> they are signing up for, but also what their tolerance is for each
> system or environment that is being migrated to the cloud."

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