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High Availability & DR

Keep your critical systems online - always

Design and implementation of HA solutions that mitigate costly service outages. Always-On Availability Groups, failover clustering, log shipping and disaster recovery configurations.

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How long can your business withstand an outage?

For many businesses, SQL Server outages can render entire business units unproductive or result in thousands of dollars in lost revenue from a defunct online order system. Having a correctly configured high availability solution in place not only mitigates the risk of costly service outages, but ensures a higher degree of resilience in keeping critical systems online.

Whether you require a proven backup maintenance schedule that complies with your data recoverability requirements, or a cross-datacentre warm disaster recovery solution, our DBAs can design a DR solution to meet your needs.

Key Questions We Help You Answer

  • What is the maximum amount of data loss your business could withstand? (RPO)
  • How quickly do you need to be back online after a failure? (RTO)
  • Do you have a tested disaster recovery plan?
  • Is your backup strategy aligned with your recoverability requirements?
  • Are you protected against both local failures and site-level disasters?

HA & DR Solutions

Always-On Availability Groups

Enterprise-grade high availability with automatic failover, readable secondaries, and support for up to nine replicas across datacentres. The gold standard for SQL Server HA.

Failover Cluster Instances

Instance-level high availability using Windows Server Failover Clustering. Provides automatic failover of the entire SQL Server instance in the event of hardware or OS failure.

Log Shipping

Cost-effective warm standby solution that automatically sends transaction log backups from a primary database to one or more secondary databases. Ideal for DR scenarios where some data loss is acceptable.

Backup & Recovery Strategy

Comprehensive backup maintenance schedules aligned with your RPO and RTO requirements. Full, differential, and transaction log backup strategies with verified recovery testing.

Cross-Datacentre DR

Geographically distributed disaster recovery solutions spanning multiple datacentres or cloud regions. Protection against site-level failures with configurable failover procedures.

Our Approach

Protecting what matters most

We design HA and DR solutions based on your specific business requirements - not one-size-fits-all templates.

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Requirements Assessment

We start by understanding your business requirements - RPO, RTO, compliance mandates, and budget constraints - to design a solution that fits your specific needs.

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Solution Design

Architecture design incorporating the right mix of HA and DR technologies for your workloads. We document the design, failover procedures, and recovery processes.

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Implementation

Hands-on implementation of your HA/DR solution with thorough testing. We validate failover processes, recovery times, and data integrity before going live.

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Recovery Testing

Regular disaster recovery testing to verify your backup and recovery procedures work as expected. We test failover scenarios and document results for audit compliance.

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Ongoing Monitoring

Continuous monitoring of your HA/DR infrastructure - Availability Group health, backup chain integrity, synchronisation status, and failover readiness.

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Documentation

Comprehensive runbooks documenting failover procedures, recovery steps, and escalation paths. Your team knows exactly what to do in any failure scenario.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What HA options are available for SQL Server? +

SQL Server supports several high availability options including Always-On Availability Groups, Failover Cluster Instances, log shipping, and database mirroring. The right choice depends on your RPO/RTO requirements, infrastructure, and budget. We design solutions using the appropriate mix for your needs.

What's the difference between HA and DR? +

High Availability (HA) protects against local failures like hardware faults or OS crashes, typically with automatic failover and minimal downtime. Disaster Recovery (DR) protects against site-level events like data centre outages or natural disasters, typically involving a geographically separate standby environment.

Do you test disaster recovery plans? +

Yes. Regular DR testing is critical to ensure your recovery procedures actually work. We conduct planned failover tests, validate recovery times, verify data integrity, and document results for audit compliance.

What RPO and RTO can I achieve? +

With Always-On Availability Groups in synchronous commit mode, you can achieve zero data loss (RPO = 0) with automatic failover in under 30 seconds (RTO < 30s). Asynchronous configurations and log shipping offer different trade-offs between data protection and performance.

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