The fundamental principles employed in fault-tolerant systems are redundancy in system components and modularization of the design.

These two concepts are utilized in typical systems by means of fail-stop modules (also called fail-fast [Gray, 1985]) and process pairs. A fail-stop module constantly monitors itself, and whe n it detects a fault, shuts itself down automatically [Schlichting and Schneider, 198 3]. Process pairs provide fault tolerance by duplicating software modules. The idea is to eliminate single points of failure by implementing each system service as two processes that communicate and cooperate in providing the service. One of these processes is called the primary and the other the backup. Both the primary and t he backup are typically implemented as fail-stop modules that cooperate in providin g a service. There are a number of different ways of implementing process pairs, depending on the mode of communication between the primary and the backup.