October 31, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Opinions needed....
We are designing a disaster recovery solution based on the following:
We have a site in Florida that consists of 5 SQL Servers and a site in NY that will be utilized in case of a disaster.
The equipment at the New York site is almost an exact duplicate. They are currently replicating some of the servers using Doubletake. They are considering getting rid of Doubletake and utilizing replication.
The application is going through major revisions each week which sometimes include database schema changes.
With the above sceario I have suggested log shipping instead, based on the fact that the data in New York will only need to be accessed in the event of a disaster, schema changes are an additional administrative task in replication and I believe there will be less added stress on the system
Am I correct in suggesting log shipping in the scenario or am I just avoiding replication and shouldn't be?
November 1, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I'd definitely go with log shipping as well. Its a more recognized high availability solution. I see replication as more for scale-out, where you want data distributed and available in multiple locations.
You want this for DR and the DR site will not be accessed so log shipping is perfect for this.
As its DR you will want an exact duplicate of the data, log shipping will guarantee this as all changes to the database are copied over, DML and DDL, replication does not guarantee that. Make all the schema changes you want, log shipping will handle it seamlessly
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November 2, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I would suggest that you have a look at database mirroring instead of log shipping. It is pretty easy to configure and manage and gives you pretty much the same functionality as log shipping.
November 5, 2008 at 7:54 am
1) NO replication - it is not for disaster recovery / business continuity
2) Agree - first look at mirroring as part of the process. Hardware failure and other localized problems are a far greater risk than having the entire site go down. And mirroring is really great.
3) For true DR/bcp then you can consider log shipping, or just simply copying over backups
Make sure you really define the risks, and what the expectations are as part of the outcome before solving the problem.
The more you are prepared, the less you need it.
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