Word of the Week: Failover

Failover: The capability of switching to a redundant or standby computer server. Also a verb; sometimes spelled fail over: To switch to a standby server.

Last week’s BlackBerry outage affected an estimated 35 million global customers, including me*. An October 12 Talking Points Memo story quoted a service memo from BlackBerry parent company Research in Motion’s chief information officer, Robin Bienfait**:

Although the system is designed to failover to a back-up switch, the failover did not function as previously tested. As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to many of you and we will continue to keep you informed. – October 11, 21:30 (emphasis added).

When I tweeted that failover was new to me, my tech-speaking Twitter friends quickly set me straight:

 

I found no definitions for failover in standard dictionaries. Here are the Wiktionary definitions (via Wordnik):

1. A means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel, backup system which is kept running at all times so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup.
2. An automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system.

As you can see, the verb “to failover” (or “to fail over”) hasn’t yet been included—but not because it hasn’t been used. “To failover” yields 140,000 Google hits. (“To fail over” produces more than 3 million results, but most of them use the “failover” spelling.)

The opposite of failover is failback: “the restoration of a system in a state of failover back to its original state (before the failure occurred).” (Wordnik).

I found a couple of dead trademarks with failover (Auto Failover and One-Click Failover) and one dead trademark with failback (Failback, from eNetica Solutions, Inc.). There’s an apparently live product called Simple Failover, from JH Software, with no record of a trademark application.

 

Comb-over fail = failover? From A Gallery of Ridiculously Bad Comb Overs.

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* I use a BlackBerry, but I hardly depend on it. I wasn’t aware of the service problem until I read about it on Twitter, where someone (sorry, can’t remember who!) linked to the TPM story.

** Bienfait translates to “well made” or “well done.”

Comments

[Jonathon]

Is the verb actually "failover" or "fail over"? It would make sense to me to say that a system failed over to the backup, but not that it failovered to the backup. I wonder if it's like "login" where everybody writes the infinitive as one word, even though it's pretty clearly two in other situations.

[mike]

You can find "failover" as a feature name, if not a brand name, in something like SQL Server 2005 Failover Clustering (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&id=19736).

[Nancy Friedman]

@Jonathon: RIM spells it "failover," but I assume they'd use "failed over" for the past tense.

Personally, I prefer two words for "log in" (verb), but I realize it's a losing battle.

[mike]

@Jonathon -- there's a strong tendency for people to mash together verbs that have associated prepositional bits. As you say, "to login" is one example; in my own work, I very frequently also see "to setup" and "to backup." I've also seen "to warmup," "to passout," "to turndown," and "to workout."

re: "to fail over" specifically, some old (and edited) content on the Microsoft site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189134.aspx) pretty consistently uses "failover" as a noun or adjective, and "fail over" as a verb. (One example: "Allow one failover cluster node to fail over to any other node in the failover cluster configuration.") Your logic is correct to my mind (for example, people write "to setup" but they don't write "she setups"), but I think that ordinary writers don't necessarily think this sort of thing thru all that carefully.

[Jonathon]

"I think that ordinary writers don't necessarily think this sort of thing thru all that carefully."

Good point. I guess that's why they pay us to edit, right?

[Nancy Friedman]

Coincidentally, June Casagrande of Grammar Underground addresses "login" v. "log in" in a new blog post: http://www.grammarunderground.com/?p=1260

Also backup/back up, signoff/sign off, and other pairs ... but not failover/fail over.

[CGHill]

I admit I'm late to the party, but this status report from a Web host seems like a pretty good example of "fail over" in the two-word variety.

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2011/10/28/shared-server-managua-is-offline-due-to-unscheduled-filesystem-check/

Note that the URL differs from the title; as the situation progressed, the title was updated, presumably for the benefit of RSS subscribers.