In this article, RTC Magazine reports that the high availability (HA) systems market is moving rapidly from an in-house proprietary systems approach to a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) direction, making such solutions available to a wider range of applications. In comparing the two alternatives, it is driving quite a lot of comment.

One comment is from my colleague Dara Ambrose. Dara points out that another important factor to consider when implementing a HA solution is the cost of validating that it can withstand faults and continue to perform as expected.

In his comment he explains why pushing as much of the HA solution into COTS components as possible, can greatly reduce this investment.