Patent attributes
A method and apparatus for facilitating failover of a stateful protocol connection is disclosed herein. The disclosed method includes receiving data sent by a first external entity in accordance with the stateful protocol connection. Acknowledgment of receipt of the data is withheld until a predefined operation involving the data has been performed. The method further includes transferring state information relating to the stateful protocol connection to a standby system. Once the predefined operation involving the data has been performed, the acknowledgment of receipt of the data is sent to the first external entity. This enables the stateful protocol connection to be failed over to the standby system with minimal or any data loss. In a particular implementation the predefined operation comprises committing the data to an application and receiving a send acknowledgment command from the application. In other implementations the predefined operation may comprise sending the data to a host entity and receiving confirmation that it has been received at the host.
