I am helping a couple of friends who have small businesses, each with a single server. They have become concerned about the business cost of a server outage, but have a limited budget for redundancy. I used to work on this stuff, but have been out of it for several years, so I'd like to solicit suggestions from you all. Our goals are to provide quick & simple server failover at a modest cost, but not necessarily instantaneous or automatic. I've thought of a few categories of solutions:
1. Off-line server spare - Keep another server of same HW configuration; if live server, which has pair of HDD's in RAID-1 mirror, fails, remove one of the drives from the failed server, pop it into the spare server and fire it up, with same server name & IP address. I wonder if this would work - the disk controller in the spare server might not accept a drive from the other server. Also this would not protect from a major electrical problem, say both drives got zapped.
1a. A variation of server spare - maintain a spare server with distinct name & IP address, synchronize data nightly. If live server fails, shut it down, then rename the spare server and give it the IP address of the failed live server.
2. Failover SW such as Double Take or StorageCraft.
3. Server cluster - probably too expensive, especially if a SAN were used.
4. Virtualization.
Appreciate any suggestions.
Bob
P.S. This thread has been moved from Servers>General to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). -HP Forum Moderator
