April 26, 2011 at 5:04 am
Hi Santosh,
The environment you have (W2003 SBS & SQL 2000 Std) is intended for a small business on a limited budget. Having chosen this option, there are limitations on the availability and data loss that can be achieved.
SBS is designed for fairly low availability. If a server fails you have to restore backups on to another server, and this means it will take a number of hours before you are running again if you have a spare server available, or a few days if one has to be purchased. Likewise for data loss, any data you enter into the system after the final working backup will be totally lost when you do a restore.
This level of availability and data loss was typically not thought to be a problem for small businesses even 5 years ago, but today almost all businesses want to be online all the time, and customers are not very forgiving if data loss occurrs.
I think you should look at your availability and data loss objectives from a business viewpoint. What amount of downtime can your business cope with before things turn to chaos. What amount of data loss can your business cope with before you no longer remember what changes were made since the last backup.
You should also consider that W2003 and SQL 2000 are no longer supported by Microsoft, and there is a declining pool of people who know how to put this type of system together. The fact you are running software of this age possibly means your hardware is a similar age, and therefore nearing the end of its working life. Any solution you decide to implement should aim to use currently supported software and new hardware, and the cost of this needs to be factored in to your plans.
It may be that moving from an in-house to a hosted solution would be a good way forward, but this depends on the reliability and speed of internet connections where you operate.
You should also look at how you can mitigate the impact of the gap between what your current solution can provide and what your business currently needs. Look at the data you would miss the most. I see you are in the Hotel business, so parhaps this critical data includes:
* Room booking grid
* Current outstanding customer billing
* Room cleaning schedule
* Restaurant schedule
If any of these items are critical, look at alternative ways of providing them. If your existing system provides this information in standard reports, get them run automatically every (say) 15 minutes to disk files and have the output automatically copied to some of your other computers. In this way if your server crashes then you still have immediate access to your business critical data.
If your current system cannot do this, it should be possible to fairly easily write queries to populate an excel spreadsheet with this data, and get the spreadsheets copied to some desktop machines.
Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.
When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara
May 3, 2011 at 12:14 pm
How about Log Shipping ?
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966381.aspx
Or did someone already mention it ?
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