Maintaining a mirrored or reporting server to act as a live backup

The situation

You need a mirrored server to act as a live backup for your main server. The mirrored server must run in parallel, and be available to take over if disaster strikes the main server. However, you haven't got a huge budget, so you can't set up a failover cluster for this.

Key challenges

  • Keeping the mirrored server in step with the main server.
  • Keeping expenditure to a minimum.

How we can solve it

Use SQL Backup to perform regular backups of the primary server, and restore them on the secondary server.

  1. Set up a shared folder on the mirrored server so that the main server can write to it.
  2. On the main server, schedule SQL Backup™ to back up the transaction log periodically and automatically copy the resulting backups to the mirrored server.
  3. On the mirrored server, schedule SQL Backup to restore the transaction log and automatically move the files to another folder after the restore process has completed.

Benefits of our solution

  • SQL Backup is a cost-effective solution, saving approximately $30,000 compared with the license fees required to achieve this using Microsoft technology.
  • Automated process ensures that the mirrored server is kept in step.
  • SQL Backup also offers a number of additional features, such as a dramatic reduction in the time to create backups, 128-bit encryption to make your backups secure, and compression of the backup.

Case studies

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