Why isnt Active/Active the norm?

I'm a technologist who admits to having some strong technical prejudices-

 

 

- I hate slow applications and websites ... which is why I choose to work in performance

 

- I prefer vendors who nurture open customer discussions (as F5 does)

 

- I prefer open source to commercial software (unless the commercial is demonstrably better)

 

- I bristle at the idea of "enterprise vendors" having seen too much shelfware and wasted dollars when people spend "Other People's Money"

 

- I hate seeing hardware thats under-utilized having seen how it makes it harder to build snappy, fast systems.

 

 

 

and, in general, I hate Active/Standby configurations, because I don't like seeing hardware sitting "idle" and I mistrust that Standby systems will work unless I see them working.

 

 

 

All that said, I've become a fan of F5 after having worked with many other hardware and software load balancers in the past. But one question stumps me:

 

 

 

why is the most common LTM configuration active/standby and not dual active?

 

 

 

Peter