Microsoft® SQL Server High Availability

Other Industry Trends in High Availability

Third-party hardware innovations continue to lead the way in evolving high availability. Microsoft will not go into the hardware business (I don't think), so look for most of the major hardware vendors to be pushing heavily into “blade” and other “hot swappable” hardware architectures for years to come. This will also be much more tightly tied to the virtual machines approach (and the virtual server) so successfully utilized in the Unix world.

Disk/media vendors are quickly gobbling up horizontally compatible companies and combining their expertise to provide more reliable and available content platforms. An example of this was when EMC recently bought Documentum and then rolled out a completely integrated ...