HyderabadAchieving High Availability of Databases through Failover Clustering for databases using Microsoft SQL Server 2008

One of the major challenges which IT systems face today is System Availability. Availability is critical in terms of components viz., Web Server, Database Server, and Network. Without availability, services fail, SLAs exceed, revenue is lost and finally a bad publicity can leave a lasting effect on endusers. Availability of an IT system is being measured in currency, not in time anymore. Right strategies have to be adopted to make systems Highly Available. For a database, its not just availability but preservation without loss of data (till the point of failure) which is very important. SQL Server 2008 provides various High Availability technologies like Backup, Clustering, Mirroring, Log shipping and Replication. This paper gives an overview of High Availability technologies with primary focus on the Database Failover Clustering.