Some of our clients have been asking what solutions are best suited to provide a failover mechanism for Color Factory or Connect servers running in the Fotoware system. 

This way, a backup server running the Color Factory and/or Connect services will be able to take over in the event of main server failure.

The best way to address this is to use a Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC).

Essentially they work like this:

1. Active server frequently sends pings to the standby server ("I'm alive", "I'm alive", ....)
2. Standby server expects to hear ping frequently. If no more pings, the standby server expects that the active server is no longer alive, and starts up the required services.

This is also in compliance with Fotoware redundancy licenses (HOT/COLD failover).