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There are two questions here - data integrity and service availability. To the first question - daily backups are too rare, consider incremental SQL log backup
by DenisM 15y ago
There are two questions here - data integrity and service availability.
To the first question - daily backups are too rare, consider incremental SQL log backups throughout the day, like every 15 minutes.
To the second question - 5 minute downtime is likely a lot less important for your business than you think. But your hardware will fail at some point and cause several days of downtime it takes to order a new machine. It's probably not acceptable so you will need a standby machine.
Personally I run all my SQL Servers on AWS EC2, so if one of my servers fails I can simple reattach the EC2 EBS volume to another machine and I am back in business a few minutes later. I also do EBS disk snapshots every 15 minutes. Even if entire availability zone fails, I can restore the EBS disk from a snapshot and get up and running in about an hour.
The setup you are describing will work as well it just seems very capital intensive with all the hardware and software licenses. And you're still prone to Geo failure (power failure, flood, tornado, fire, theft).
- dennisgorelik 15y agoDennisM - how much that AWS EC2 solution did cost to you in terms of time spent on setup and testing and hosting fees?
- DenisM 15y agoSetup is a breeze. Launching a new instance takes 10-15 minutes, and from there it's well, the same old story of installing recent OS updates and your own stuff. I split this in two parts - "provisioning", that is installing generic stuff (IIS, SQL Server, python for scripts etc), and "setup", that is installing my own databases, scripts, and ASP.NET apps. So, I have created an instance, did "provisioning" on it, and then created a "pre-canned provisioned image". Now I can create as many EC2 instances from it as I need, and only thing that is left is deploying my own stuff - that takes one-click and however many minutes it takes to copy the data. Actually, the data does not always have to be copied - if you are tearing down old machine you simply reattach the EBS volume and it takes zero seconds. If you are creating a copy of older production machine, you can create an EBS volume from a production snapshot, but that volume is available immediately, populated from the snapshot in the background, prioritizing parts of the volume you're trying to access. Hence the volume is immediately online, but is very slow at first. Re cost, please have a look at this blog post of mine, in particular the TCO columns of the spreadsheet: http://blog.altudov.com/2010/11/03/amazon-ec2-reserved-instance-cost-breakdown/ http://blog.altudov.com/2010/11/03/amazon-ec2-reserved-insta...