OPC UA provides the data structures and services by which Redundancy may be achieved in a standardized manner. Redundancy may be used for high availability, fault tolerance and load balancing. OPC 10000-4 formally defines Client, Server and Network Redundancy. Whether and what Redundancy is supported by an OPC UA Application is defined by its Profiles. Profiles are described in OPC 10000-7.

Required client and server behaviours are associated with two distinct modes of Server Redundancy, transparent and non-transparent. The Client and Server responsibilities when using either transparent or non-transparent redundancy are defined in OPC 10000-4.

Servers that support non-transparent redundancy can also support client controlled load balancing. The health of a Server including its ability to Service requests is collectively defined as ServiceLevel. See OPC 10000-5 for a formal definition of ServiceLevel. OPC 10000-4 defines four distinct ServiceLevel sub-ranges and example usage.