As many businesses are discovering today, it's more important than ever to ensure access to business critical applications and data when failures occur.
This is why high availability (ha) solutions are important for every business to implement.
A ha solution simply means that computing systems will continue to run to perform the tasks they were designed to perform.
Since no server is completely safe from failure, it's important that you have solutions in place to ensure that your applications continue to run even in the event of a disaster.
These disasters could be anything from hardware failures, software issues or a disaster at your facility that would cause your applications to be unavailable if a ha solution isn't in place.
How to Choose a High Availability Solution Since all businesses are different, there's not one clear answer as to which high availability solutions are right for you.
To choose the right ha solution, first analyze the goals and requirements of your business.
You'll have to determine the operational risks and any potential disruptions your solution could cause.
Your analysis should find a way to match your business needs with your budget to attain the overall best solution for high availability.
The market today offers a variety of high availability solutions for your business to select from including:

• Simple server failover: This type of ha solution provides application recovery by assigning the host name and IP address of a primary server to a standby server while restarting the application on the standby server.
  The configuration of the standby server is identical to the primary server so running applications on either is possible.
  
• High availability clustering: This is a ha solution that offers recovery of critical applications which are organized as groups of resources.
  When a disaster occurs and the primary server fails, cluster management software will automatically failover all groups of resources from the primary server to the standby server.
  
• High performance clustering: As a ha solution, this type of load balancing clustering involves a group of servers that have identical components so that each server can take a portion of the workload.
  

With any ha solution you choose to deploy, you will still experience some downtime.
This is because all users connected to the failed server will be disconnected and any data not written to the database will be lost.
Downtime will also occur because you'll need time to restart the server.
Once systems are restarted, each user will have to log in again and restart whatever work they were performing.
In addition to experiencing downtime with or without a ha solution, each time your server fails, there will be some cost associated with restoring the server.
There can be significant cost associated with getting a server back up and running once power has been turned on.
If the server is in a remote location, there could be travel costs associated with fixing it.
In addition, time is money.
The time it takes to restore your system translates to a loss in productivity and revenue.
Although you will find that downtime and costs are not completely eliminated with implementation of a high availability solution, both of these can be significantly reduced.