HA is for High Availability. And, "real" depends on what you mean. People used to measure availability in "nines". A typical demanding level, used in telecommunications, is called five-nines because it represents 99.999% availability. Over one year span, this leaves you with about 5 minutes of total allowed downtime. To have a better idea what it means, you have to assume the reliability of your system, i.e. how often it can fail or be brought down--for any reason: software, hardware, or maintenance. Say, it is once per week. This is 52 times during a year. With that, your time to recover is narrowed down to 6 seconds. Very likely, to have some additional safe margin, you would like to recover in 1-2 seconds. The game becomes serious. You know there is no way you can physically repair any computer in 1-2 seconds. You need to have redundant hardware and to have at least a hot-standby configuration (active/standby) to perform failovers.
In the …
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