>We have been requested to come up with specifications necessary for our current WC application to be blessed with a guaranteed uptime of 99%, 24x7. I’ll give you what our current specifications are and then perhaps some talking points on what might be necessary.
>

99% is not an adequate measure of availability; it means that you will be down for approximately 1 minute every 1 2/3 hours. You should be looking into 5 9s availability (99.999%), achievable with fault-tolerant single machines; clustering, failover, duplexing and RAID 10 are technologies you might consider investigating.


>Currently:
>-Our servers are co-located at a secure, guaranteed facility
>-IIS 5.0 is running on a Dell server with a Verisign certificate along with other applications written in ASP running Crystal Reports and other ActiveX controls.
>-Application is running with 3 instances as COMs.
>-Hitting VFP data on another Dell server with a 4 drive RAID-5 configuration.
>-Going to integrate some SQL Server data in the near future.
>
>Some possible talking points:
>-Load balancing hardware
>-Duplicate dedicated IIS Servers
>-Duplicate data file servers mirrored in some fashion
>-Duplicate SQL Servers – replicated or mirrored in some fashion
>-Some type of monitoring service with live bodies that could potentially attempt to bring up the system if it goes down.
>-UPS with remote control capability allowing us to do a hard startup and shutdown of the server over the internet.
>-Anything else that I haven’t thought of.
>
>If anyone has undertaken this task, we’d appreciate your input and comments.