Data recovery is a key step in providing availability to the systems. Hardware and software play a vital role in helping the system to minimize the downtime. The more complex and larger a database application, the more important it is to automate administrative tasks with proactive maintenance tasks to ensure data is available. The key factors for hardware and software solutions are cost, implementation, and feature support, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Any high-availability solution must have provisions for hardware availability and data availability. These two provisions must work in parallel to build an effective, high-availability strategy, which requires planning and implementation at the SQL Server instance configuration level. SQL Server 2008 R2 has no new features with regard to Availability; with the only enhancements in this area being the performance improvements to database mirroring, replication, and database backup...