In today's world of ever-expanding hours of business operation and increasing reliance on data availability, it is becoming easier for companies of all sizes to justify the cost of a high availability solution.

When evaluating HA, it's important that you understand its critical components, including how the solution fits into your particular environment, the degree of automation that is built into the system, and what it will require of your IT staff resources to manage the solution. Hopefully, this white paper has improved your understanding on these points.

One parting caveat: Depending on the size and complexity of your information systems, there are many other factors to consider besides the installation of a high availability solution when trying to reduce your vulnerability to planned and unplanned downtime. High availability clearly is a significant component in an overall data recovery/system availability strategy, but it often takes a variety of software and even hardware components to provide maximum protection against all exposures to downtime.