High-Availability White Papers and Resources for SQL Server

In foreground, attendee makes dreaded "shoot myself" hand sign to the speaker.

I was just telling the good people of Charlotte about how they (and how YOU) need to read all things by Paul Randal (blog | twitter), except for all of his cheesy romance novels like Caress and Conquer written under the nom de plum of Connie Mason.

There's lots more good stuff from Paul, not romantically

This is a 'so-last-version' whitepaper describing  five common high-availability and disaster-recovery architectures deployed by customers, along with a case study of each. Although the white paper is specific to SQL Server 2008 R2 and isn't updated for AlwaysOn features, it's still really, really good.  It covers:

You can get it from this link.  Not everything is transferable to new AlwaysOn technologies, but then again AlwaysOn is an Enterprise Edition feature.  So the database mirroring recommendation can be upsized, in many if not all cases, to SQL Server 2012, while the SAN and peer-to-peer recommendations continue to hold fast.

In addition, I encourage you to get up to speed on AlwaysOn.  There are two great AlwaysOn FAQs that I recommend.  The first is Microsoft’s official AlwaysOn FAQ at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/gg508768.aspx.  The second comes from my buddy and high-availability expert Allan Hirt (blog | twitter) at http://www.sqlha.com/2012/04/13/allans-alwayson-availability-groups-faq/. 

To get started with AlwaysOn, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645581.aspx.

Enjoy,

-Kev