According to one aspect of the present disclosure, a system includes an active network element having circuitry for executing a primary application and a transmission control protocol (TCP) module, multiple standby network elements having circuitry for executing a secondary copy of the primary application and a secondary TCP module, and a network connection coupled to one or more of the active and standby network elements, wherein the active network element and standby network elements are coupled to transfer data and acknowledgments via their respective TCP modules, and wherein the standby network elements are reconfigurable to communicate via the network connection to a peer regardless of the failure of one or two of the network elements.