Fail Safe is a clustering solution.

The two (data guard & failsafe) are complimentary but somewhat orthogonal here.

Failsafe is designed to keep the single database up and available -- in a single data center. As long as that room exists -- failsafe keeps the database up.

data guard is a disaster recovery solution. It is for when the room the data center is in "goes away" for whatever reason.


Data guard wants the machines to be independent (no clusters) of eachother and separated by some geographic distance.

Failsafe, like 9i RAC, wants the machines to be tethered together - sitting right next to eachother in a cluster.

Failsafe is HA (high availability)
Data guard is DR (disaster recovery)


Failsafe will give you automated failover. As long as the data center exists, that database is up.

With data guard -- you do not WANT automated failover (many *think* they do but you don't). Do you really want your DR solution to kick in due to a WAN failure? No, not really. For DR to take over, you want a human to say "yup, data center burnt to the ground, lets head for the mountains". You do not want the DR site to kick in because "it thinks the primary site is gone" -- you need to tell it "the primary site is gone". In a cluster -- the machines are very aware of eachother and automated failover is "safe"


So, data guards reference to failsafe is incidental.
That failsafe doesn't talk about data guard is of no real consequence.

They are independent feature/functions.