Disaster Planning with NT servers / running parellel servers

[ilpadrino]

I'm tired of the pressures of system crashes. Even if we have good system backups our recovery time is too long for the business. Recently one of our email server's motherboard 'broke' and we had to replace it.

Does anyone have any suggestions for making recovery time as minimal as possible. I'm not talking about UPS and tape backups. We have all that. I'm talking about possibly running parallel NT servers so that if hardware fails, we have almost zero downtime. In other words, is there a way to run a second duplicate machine with NT 4.0 for every server we have? So that if one goes down, we just activate its backup? Or are there any other/better ideas?


Thanks in advance. Joe.

 

[rrowland]

You may want to take a look at Clustering which is available through Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition or Windows 2000 Advanced Server. This allows two servers to operate in parallel and if one server goes down, users are shifted to the second server on the fly.

A better description can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/ntserverenterprise/techdetails/overview/NTSEE.asp

Hope this helps

Richard

 

[polymath5]

You should check out DoubleTake at

http://www.nsisoftware.com.

We are using it to replicate our SQL server offsite. It has automatic failover, should be what you are looking for. $2500 per server, so it's not cheap. You can set it so if the connection fails, it automatically reestablishes it. Their tech support is 24/7 and quite good. They will walk you through getting it going, but the docs are pretty good too.