Hello Groups,



Have a question regarding high availability solutions.



Scenario:

Load Balanced (3 Server) High Volume Transactional Web Site (E-Commerce).



Primary Database Server:

SQL 2K Enterprise

Compaq ProLiant DL580

Quad Proc Intel 902

Total Physical Memory: 8GB

Drives:

1 RAID 5 Logical Drive

98 GB Partition For Datafiles

75.2 GB Partition For Transaction Logs



Warm Standby Server:

SQL 2K Enterprise

Compaq ProLiant DL380 G2

Dual Proc Intel 1.4

Total Physical Memory: 4GB

Drives:

2 RAID 1 + 0 Logical Drives

1 RAID 5 Logical Drive

33.91 GB Partition For Datafiles

7.19 GB Partition For Transaction Logs



Primary Server Ships Tranny Logs From Two Databases To Secondary Server
Every 15 Minutes.



Secondary Used Only For Warm Standby



Question:



We are deploying a new application to our web servers.

It will concurrently on all three web servers.



The Application is a .NET APP Grabbing Data From Two Separate Databases On
SQL 2K eg: DBContent (DSS Stuff.) and DBTransaction (Inventory, OLTP
Stuff)



Management is trying to get me to deploy 1 of the two databases
(DBTransaction) used by this application on the Primary server and the other
database (DBContent) on the Warm Standby Server.



They have additionally asked me to pin DBContent in memory on the warm
standby server.



Apart from being a pain when the primary goes down, (Changing machine
configs on the 3 .NET Severs while failing over the database..)



I believe application performance will suffer form having to marshal data
from 2 separate servers and combine this data into one result set before
arriving at the web servers (Time on the wire between the two is going to be
a performance hit.)



I am also of the opinion that instead of having a dedicated warm standby
server I now have two points of exposure, should disaster strike.





Am I correct in being concerned about this setup? It sounds pretty shaky to
me and I am quite reluctant to endorse this solution.



Is this a risky setup?

If so, why?



What collateral should I get together before pleading my case?



Am I completely off base?



Thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions.



Regards,



B.