Mark Eckeard (8/15/2012)
The load on the server shouldn't be high but we have almost 50 total locations, our network isn't exactly lightening fast and we have financial data that simple cannot be lost or interrupted. And sadly, I don't think there's money for upgrades.My main concern is mostly the lack of expertise with this. We have yet to hire a FT DBA and the person (not me) writing the reports may not be well versed using SQL Server.
This is good advice and thanks to everyone who posted. I'll take everything in to consideration when we discuss this again.
Mark
1) As other's have said, if you are doing log shipping you have to manage your restores since you can't have reports running and do a restore at the same time. It is doable though, just a PITA.
2) Mirroing can get you point-in-time copies of the data, but again you have to manage the naming scheme and connections to each snapshot. This can lead to much more performance problems than the log shipping scenario since it means multiple copies of the same data pages in memory.
3) You REALLY REALLY need to get a professional on board to help you understand what your needs really are from an HA/DR/Reporting perspective and help you chose and implement the correct option(s). I will offer my services to help with this as well as other DBA activities (maintenance, perf analysis/tuning, backups, etc). There are a number of other qualified consultants on SSC.com too. I know of more than one company that thought they could do things without a DBA and something went south ... and the company went out of business. Don't let that be you!!
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service