Ask Slashdot: Low Cost Way To Maximize SQL Server Uptime?

Posted by samzenpus on Monday June 25, 2012 @06:42AM from the bang-for-your-buck dept.

jdray writes "My wife and I own a mid-sized restaurant with a couple of Point of Sale (POS) terminals. The software, which runs on Windows and .NET, uses SQL Server on the back end. With an upgrade to the next major release of the software imminent, I'm considering upgrading the infrastructure it runs on to better ensure uptime (we're open seven days a week). We can't afford several thousand dollars' worth of server infrastructure (two cluster nodes and some shared storage, or some such), so I thought I'd ask Slashdot for some suggestions on enabling maximum uptime. I considered a single server node running VMWare with a limp-mode failover to a VMWare instance on a desktop, but I'm not sure how to set up a monitoring infrastructure to automate that, and manual failover isn't much of an option with non-tech staff. What suggestions do you have?"

1 of 284 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it by gnetwerker · 2012-06-25 07:19 · Score: 4, Interesting

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. You haven't taken the first and most essential step in analyzing your problem: measuring it. Is your problem caused by network failure? By power? By software failure? Hardware? If hardware, by server hardware, disks, or something else?
If software, by OS, database, or application software? All of these have different solutions. Going to the cloud won't solve a network failure, it will make things worse. Going to the cloud may improve persistent hardware failures. but the MTBF of most decent hardware is pretty good, so are you sure you have clean power and a good (cool, clean) environment?
If your software or system is crashing, then that's its own problem.