Redundancy Theater: Designing Failover That Actually Works

Many building teams assume redundancy equals resilience — until a failover reveals gaps that specs never caught. In this episode Alex Morgan interviews Michael Harrington to cut through the theater of ‘redundant’ systems that fail when stressed. We define common forms of false redundancy (shared physical paths, untested switchover logic, single human-dependence), explore the tradeoffs owners face between cost and meaningful backup, and present practical acceptance criteria and testable scenarios facilities and IT can use during design and commissioning. Michael shares concise, anonymized examples where assumed backups didn’t help tenants and outlines how operations, vendors, and procurement can align on verifiable outcomes instead of paper promises. Listeners will get a short, vendor-neutral checklist for prioritizing redundancy investments, setting realistic SLAs, and making failover testing a routine part of building operations — all aimed at reducing surprise outages without prescribing specific products or configurations.