A Common Mode Failure is a single cause that disables multiple supposedly redundant components at once, defeating the redundancy, for example a shared fuel supply, control system, cooling source or software fault affecting both the primary and backup. Data center resilience design specifically hunts for and eliminates common mode dependencies, since they turn redundant systems into hidden single points of failure.
Category: Resilience & Availability · Subcategory: Redundancy Topologies · Part of the AIDC Technical Terminology reference.