Awesome Mitch. Thank you.

I just got off the phone with my HP VAR, the tech rep, not the sales gal. We're going to talk about new servers and what to get if I want to have a solid Plan B. He suggested not clustering, not NeverFail, but System State Restore from Symantec. He claims that this potion will let me restore to different hardware. Sounds nice.

I'd like to have (and the boss is willing to buy) a spare machine, suitable for service in any role of any in use machine right now, that I could plug in, "System State Restore - ify" and be back on the track after a brief pit stop. Then I would get the busted machine fixed at my leisure, and then reverse the process when the starter could return to the lineup. (Mixing metaphors is fun!)

I now support a half a dozen locations from Finland to the Pacific coast. That's a lot of timezones and when I'm down, somebody's not working. I need to take steps to minimize that exposure.

You're right. And they don't ship BF Goodrich Comp T/As in the spare wheel well either, but I'll take what I can get til I get what I need.

That's brutal!

Did I mention I'm out-of-office this week, and I didn't even bring my pager with me? na-na-na-na-boo-boo

BigV,

The FC SAN will really help you out no matter what HA solution you should choose. That way, at least, you can just have your spare box, run sp_attach_db, and be off with SQL Server 2005 even if you just have a LUN. You really want to abstract storage and backups away from the machine :).

Symantec/Veritas does make some good software. I really like what I see from Enterprise Vault. At least it's the ex-Veritas making the software, not the Symantec people (there are big issues with Symantec Endpoint Protection which I have found).