If a higher degree of availability is required than provided by the above procedure, the following options should be considered:
-
Virtual machine infrastructure and scheduled snapshots and backups can simplify the process of failover to a new environment or an environment in an earlier state.
-
Network Attached Storage can be used to provide a higher-availability location for attachment storage or the system configuration files. Bringing up a service on a different server can be as simple as mounting the attached storage to the new server and starting up the services.
-
At a server hardware level, use of technologies such as RAID storage controllers can help build storage redundancy into the system.
-
A highly-available web server can be used between the users and the server in order to redirect traffic to a backup server directly.
-
Standard hardware redundancy decrease the possibility of a failure.