High availability GIS: Beyond the application to the operating
environment High Availability enables recovery from server
failure While recovery from disk failure and network failure
must be an integral part of any High Availability solution, the
scope of this paper is specifically recovery from server
failure. Consider the impact of losing a GIS application server
or data server: all clients accessing the spatial applications
and files on that server are affected; all users’ activities are
suspended until the server problem is diagnosed and resolved.
High Availability solutions are designed for computing
installations that require critical applications to be
automatically and seamlessly restarted in the event of server
failure, ensuring that data remains accessible and that
applications be kept running, even during a prolonged failure of
the second and third tiers of a client/server implementation.
When considering a High Availability solution, one often thinks
of expensive and custom hardware, and sophistic