Data Availability

Data availability in SQL Server is organized into three groups.

1. Data recovery
2. High availability
3. Disaster recovery
Data in your database must be available and must be protected
based on your defined level of protection.
Risk Solution
Data Potential data Data redundancy
Recovery loss
High Complex to Automatic fail over
Availability manage
Disaster Downtime of System redundancy
Recovery business
operations

The main differences between HA and DR:

 High availability ensures that the data is available with as

little down time as possible.

 Disaster recovery ensures that down time is as short as

possible.
Once you have an accepted HA business plan you must still
have a DR plan for your data and resources. You should always
plan on a disaster where you will need to get your business up
and running.

HA and DR Techniques

Before deciding on a technique for HA or DR, you should consider one of the following recovery
modes:

Standby Mode

Cold standby ¤Manual process required ¤Backup and restore

Warm standby ¤Data copy ready to use ¤Transaction log shipping

¤Potential data loss ¤Database mirroring

¤ Manual failover required ¤Always On AG

Hot standby ¤Automatic failover ¤Database mirroring

¤Failover clustering

¤Always On AG

You will find through SQL Server or third party tools (i.e. RedGate Software), there are a few
options for implementing a HA/DR environment.

Below are some HA/DR methods:

1. Clustering

2. Database Mirroring.

3. Replication

4. Log Shipping
 5. Backup and restore

6. Detach and Attach

HA Vs DR:

HA (or High Availability) is the technique of keeping a service up and

running in the event of a system failure or hardware failure of a single
server. For example, getting the database back up and running after the
motherboard fails. This would be resolved by your HA solution, not
your DR solution.

DR (or Disaster Recovery) is the technique of keeping your operations

running in the event of a complete loss of a data center. For example, if
the fibre lines into your CoLo or Facility were cut, then you would need
to implement your DR strategy as your HA strategy wouldn’t do any
good as the facility is now off the network.

Clustering and Mirroring are probably the best way to build a top notch
HA / DR setup; when combined correctly.
The RTO and RPO are the Recovery Time Objective and the
Recovery Point Objective.
The RTO is defined as the amount of time that it takes to get the system
back online after a critical system failure.
The RPO is defined as the amount of data which can be lost while
bringing the system back online after a critical system failure.
Calculating Uptime:
Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. The following table
shows the downtime that will be allowed for a particular percentage of availability, presuming
that the system is required to operate continuously. Service level agreements often refer to
monthly downtime or availability in order to calculate service credits to match monthly billing
cycles. The following table shows the translation from a given availability percentage to the
corresponding amount of time a system would be unavailable per year, month, or week.

Availability % Downtime per year Downtime per month* Downtime per week
90% ("one nine") 36.5 days 72 hours 16.8 hours
95% 18.25 days 36 hours 8.4 hours
97% 10.96 days 21.6 hours 5.04 hours
98% 7.30 days 14.4 hours 3.36 hours
99% ("two nines") 3.65 days 7.20 hours 1.68 hours
99.5% 1.83 days 3.60 hours 50.4 minutes
99.8% 17.52 hours 86.23 minutes 20.16 minutes
99.9% ("three nines") 8.76 hours 43.2 minutes 10.1 minutes
99.95% 4.38 hours 21.56 minutes 5.04 minutes
99.99% ("four nines") 52.56 minutes 4.32 minutes 1.01 minutes
99.999% ("five nines") 5.26 minutes 25.9 seconds 6.05 seconds
99.9999% ("six nines") 31.5 seconds 2.59 seconds 0.605 seconds

http://easyuptimecalc.com/

uptime percentage = (u / d) * 100

u = Uptime

d=Downtime