My company provides a custom application with a SQL server backend running at a datacenter for several thousand clients. We have a mirror site in another datacenter recently set up, but switching our clients over to that site is not seamless or automatic, and would only happen if we determine the primary site is going to take more than a few hours to bring back online. Not my idea of a highly-available solution.
I am wondering what the generally used architecture is to accomplish a fault-tolerant database topology in different geographical areas:
We currently use SQL Server Replication to push all database updates to the secondary site, but its extremely unstable (replication is always breaking). Also, I haven't been successful with updatable subscriptions in the event we do failover to the backup site and want to update the primary sites databases. Plus I'm not sure if its fast enough to provide consistent data to clients who might become connected to different datacenters.
SAN options - wondering if some sort of data mirroring is the best way to accomplish this, using a WAN-linked SAN between our two datacenters. I'm not too familiar with the technology, but don't want to waste my time learing it if its not the right path to take.
Not sure of any other solutions, but more than willing to consider them!
Our SQL servers are clustered in two-node shared-storage setups, but I'm taking about an entire cluster going down, or the datacenter becoming completely unavailable. How do I convince my boss we can have nearly 100% uptime with no manual intervention, and consistent data across multiple locations?
Thanks for your advice
I am wondering what the generally used architecture is to accomplish a fault-tolerant database topology in different geographical areas:
We currently use SQL Server Replication to push all database updates to the secondary site, but its extremely unstable (replication is always breaking). Also, I haven't been successful with updatable subscriptions in the event we do failover to the backup site and want to update the primary sites databases. Plus I'm not sure if its fast enough to provide consistent data to clients who might become connected to different datacenters.
SAN options - wondering if some sort of data mirroring is the best way to accomplish this, using a WAN-linked SAN between our two datacenters. I'm not too familiar with the technology, but don't want to waste my time learing it if its not the right path to take.
Not sure of any other solutions, but more than willing to consider them!
Our SQL servers are clustered in two-node shared-storage setups, but I'm taking about an entire cluster going down, or the datacenter becoming completely unavailable. How do I convince my boss we can have nearly 100% uptime with no manual intervention, and consistent data across multiple locations?
Thanks for your advice
