ABSTRACT
Until the early 1990s, the fault-tolerant label was generally affixed to expensive and proprietary hardware systems for mainframes and minicomputers where the losses associated with a system’s downtime were costly. The advent of client/server computing created a market for similar products created for local area networks (LANs) because the cost of network downtime can similarly be financially devastating. Network downtime can be caused by anything from a bad network card or a failed communication gateway to a tape drive failure or loss of a tape used for backing up critical data. The chances that a LAN may fail increases as more software applications, hardware components, and users are added to the network.
