When you take an application offline, the application must close out all tasks, store data properly on shared disk, and exit. Stateful servers must not keep that state of clients in memory. States should be written to shared storage to ensure proper failover.

Commercial databases such as Oracle, Sybase, or SQL Server are good examples of well-written, crash-tolerant applications. On any client SQL request, the client is responsible for holding the request until it receives acknowledgement from the server. When the server receives a request, it is placed in a special redo log file. The database confirms that the data is saved before it sends an acknowledgement to the client. After a server crashes, the database recovers to the last-known committed state by mounting the data tables and by applying the redo logs. This returns the database to the time of the crash. The client resubmits any outstanding client requests that are unacknowledged by the server, and all others are contained in the redo logs.

If an application cannot recover gracefully after a server crashes, it cannot run in a cluster environment. The takeover server cannot start up because of data corruption and other problems.