Eliminating Single Points of Failure (SPF’s)

Eliminating Single Points of Failure (SPF’s)

Individual public servers may also present single points of failure
(SPF’s), in which case a multiple servers may be arranged into a farm to
reduce the potential for a single failure to disrupt the whole service.
The load on the individual servers should be monitored carefully, as

demonstrated in 1997 when after one of the 8 root name servers failed,
the increased load on the other 7 caused further failures and massive
delays in DNS lookups.

Corporate Network Example

Increasingly, a corporate web presence is a dynamic service with links
to other public services, and key data sources within the organization.
Consider an online financial service allowing customers to view and
change a portfolio of investments. The service must provide not only
secure connectivity from the customer to the site, but must have access
back to confidential customer data along with current fiscal
information - likely to be held in corporate databases.