Need Emergency Recovery Solution Recommendation 1

[Zych]

Hello All,

I know a solution like this exists but I don't know what it is called. Hopefully I can explain it well enough to get the answers I need. I would like to have two identical servers that work together in duplicating data between the two. If the primary fails then the secondary will come on line and take over as the primary. The old primary would then be repaired and put in as the new secondary. This way the system is almost always up and running except for the time that the switch is taking place.

Does anybody now what this product is called?

Thanks,

Zych

 

[Brycspain]

Server Mirroring - Utilizing a backup server that duplicates all the processes and transactions of the primary server. If, for any reason, the primary server fails, the backup server can immediately take its place without any down -time.

 

[Zych]

Thanks! That is what I was looking for. Does anybody use any of these products? If so which are the better ones?

Thanks,

Zych

 

[Teknoratti]

Load Balancing, also. If one server goes down your clients would connect to the other. But a cheaper solution to buying a new server would be just to have a RAID 1 mirror set on your server, that way if one drive went down you simply boot from the other drive and your set.

There is Hardware Raid which probably came with your server kit, or you can use software raid in windows disk management.

 

[Zych]

RAID 1 still leaves single points of failure like the PSU (Unless redundant), motherboard, memory, etc. 24 hrs of down time to get parts is not acceptable. I need guarenteed uptime. This way if the building is blown up I have problems but I will be up in most other cases.

Thanks for your input though.

- Zych

 

[NickFerrar]

You're looking for a clustering solution. Windows Server can do clustering out of the box but you need certain hardware configs for it to work, namely shared storage (where by both servers connect to the same set of hard disks). This provides automatic and near instant failover if a server fails.

If you're looking for something just to synch data between servers and then cut them over yourself (this is usually done between sites) there are software products out there to do it (Veritas does one I think), I've not got any experience with them though.

Load balancing isn't really what you're looking for, that spreads load between servers and can sort of handle a node failure (as long as it's at the network rather than service level) but it won't keep data between the servers synchronised.

Try here as an intro to Windows clusters:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/clustering/default.mspx

 

[ScottCr]

What are you wanting to synchronise between servers? is it just file storage in which case DFS will pretty much do what you want.

http://scottcross.blogspot.com

Windows and NT Admin.