Dont know clusters, just starting to look into them. I do, however, have
needs for fault tolarance. Starting with our email server. Sounds to me
that Clustering is a bit over kill for an Exchange server or 12gig database
to be useing as a fail over system. I'm i correct in making this
assumption?

Does anyone have any recomendations, other than Neverfail, or Double Take?

Thanks much!

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Irv
http://home.pacbell.net/irvingf

No, it isn't overkill.

I have a database that is 750 MB and another one that is 2.4 GB that we
installed a cluster explicitly for those two databases. We also have a 3rd
server which we log ship those databases to as well as 2 other servers that
we replicate the data to. That's a total of 5 machines, 2 Windows 2003
Advanced Server licenses, 3 Windows 2003 Server licenses, 3 SQL Server 2000
Enterprise Edition licenses, and 2 SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition
licenses. All of that for ~3.15 GB of data.

It all depends upon how highly you value the data. This particular data had
a monetary value to that particular company of about $400 million with a
downtime cost of approximately $400K per minute, so in comparison the
technology we threw at the problem was pretty cheap considering the
alternative.

--

Mike
Principal Mentor
Solid Quality Learning
"More than just Training"
SQL Server MVP
http://www.solidqualitylearning.com
http://www.mssqlserver.com