SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Built to Fail Over, Not Fall Over.

It covers whatever your setup needs: planning a new high availability or disaster recovery setup, repairing one that fails over badly, or reviewing one nobody has looked at in years. That includes Always On availability groups, failover cluster instances, log shipping, replication, and backup strategy. Every engagement starts with our 145-point Health Check, and you get a written summary of what we found and changed.

High availability keeps SQL Server running through a local failure, like a server or a disk, usually with automatic failover in seconds. Disaster recovery gets you back after losing a whole site, a region, or the data itself, usually with a manual failover to a second location. Most businesses need both. Two numbers set the targets: RPO (how much data you can lose) and RTO (how long you can be down).

It depends on your RPO, your RTO, your SQL Server edition, and your budget. Availability groups protect individual databases and can fail over automatically. A failover cluster instance protects the whole instance but depends on shared storage. Log shipping is a simple, dependable DR copy with manual failover. Many environments combine two. We recommend one after the assessment, not before.

Yes. Since SQL Server 2016, Standard Edition supports basic availability groups (two replicas, one database per group, no readable secondary) and two-node failover cluster instances. Log shipping also works on Standard. For many teams that covers HA without paying for Enterprise.

Yes. Call SQL Server Emergency Support. It runs 24/7/365 and is open to non-clients. A per-incident engagement works until the problem is fixed and includes root-cause analysis. Emergency retainer clients, and managed clients on Essentials and above, get a 15-minute response SLA. Once you're back up, a consulting engagement can work on the design problems behind the failure to make a repeat less likely.

Both. Much HA/DR work is on setups that already exist: replicas that fall behind, listeners that don't reconnect, clusters that won't patch cleanly, log shipping chains that break. We find out why first, then fix it.

Yes. We help with SQL Server replication, from best practices and training to performance tuning. If replication is being used as a DR tool, we'll tell you whether an availability group or log shipping would do the job better.

Yes. We've set up Always On and disaster recovery for SQL Server in Azure and AWS, often as part of a migration. If you're moving at the same time, we plan HA and DR as part of the move.

Often not. With active Software Assurance or SQL Server subscription licenses, each licensed operating-system environment (physical or virtual) can run one passive replica for HA, one for DR, and one for DR in Azure without extra core licenses, as long as each passive replica needs no more licenses than the primary would. A passive replica can still run database consistency checks, log backups, full backups, and resource monitoring. Once a secondary serves reports or other client workloads, it needs its own licenses. Without Software Assurance or a qualifying subscription, every replica needs its own licenses. We check your licensing during the planning step.

HA/DR work is scoped and delivered through our SQL Server consulting packages. You buy a block of hours and use it for the assessment, the setup, and any other SQL Server work. Block hours never expire, and the 145-point Health Check is included. After the assessment, we'll tell you what the project needs.

As soon as the next day, depending on our schedule. If you're down right now, use Emergency Support instead.