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Failover does not cut it anymore. You need an ALWAYS ON architecture with multiple data centers.
Failover, switching to a redundant or standby system when a component fails, has a long and checkered history as a way of dealing with failure. The reason is your failover mechanism becomes a single point of failure that often fails just when it's needed most. Having worked on a few telecom systems that used a failover strategy I know exactly how stressful failover events can be and how stupid you feel when your failover fails. If you have a double or triple fault in your system failover is exactly the time when it will happen.
For a long time the only real trick we had for achieving fault tolerance was to have a hot, warm, or cold standby (disk, interface, card, server, router, generator, datacenter, etc.) and failover to it when there's a problem. This old style of Disaster Recovery planning is no longer adequate or necessary.
Now, thanks to cloud infrastructures, at least at a software system level, we have an alternative: an always on architecture. Google calls this a natively multihomed architecture. You can distribute data across multiple datacenters in such away that all your datacenters are always active. Each datacenter can automatically scale capacity up and down depending on what happens to other datacenters. You know, the usual sort of cloud propaganda. Robin Schumacher makes a good case here: Long live Dear CXO – When Will What Happened to Delta Happen to You?
Recent Problems With Disaster !Recovery
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