P.O.S.S.E - or Primary Operating, Secondary Swapout Environment is our innovative 'RA' solution (Reactive Availability).

Reactive Availability was born from a need to find a mid point in e-business application avaliability. HA (high availability) is expensive to buy, expensive to run, and quite typically, can introduce new headaches.

Whilst Yottaserve still offer HA solutions to clients that require them - we ask all new customers the following question:

HA solutions should never go down. Systems which are not HA generally do, and downtime can typically range from hours to even days in the worst case.

RA solutions like POSSE react to a failed server and simply steps in and takes over.

The big difference between HA and RA is that on the OS level, with RA - you only pay for the server / OS and server applications that you are using. With HA you would need to be running more advanced clustering capable software for the OS, enterprise level applications for the server - perhaps even multiple licenses for each cluster node.

RA switchover typically takes a few minutes from when the issue has been detected - this keeps downtime to minutes not hours.

We think for the price of a few minutes - RA technology delivers a level of application which they can easily afford.

Of course, when offering HA solutions (clustered or simple load balanced) - these systems sit 'on top' of the POSSE infrastructure also. Imagine running two servers in a HA load balanced team. One server goes down, you still have one server left. But now this server is taking all the load from the failed server. It might take hours for the dead server to come back online - during which time, your system is suffering. With the POSSE system active, a replacement system is snapped in, and within minutes, you're back to two servers.

POSSE is a standard feature of YottaServes hosting environment and covers servers in colo dedicated and shared topologies.